PoliticalEye

2011-12-16T13:38:00.017-06:00

A medical district for Roseland?? Not so fast
posted 12-16-2011 1:45 p.m.

Let's get one thing straight at the start: I want Roseland to recover from its economic black hole and be able to offer good jobs to its residents. I'd love for it not to be the armpit of poverty that it's been for a few decades on the South Side of Chicago. It would be good for the people and good for the city. That said, I have to wonder what toxic waste filtered down into the drinking water there to make the local activists think that starting a medical district down there was the answer.

Gov. Quinn gave the community false hope this summer, if you ask me, by making the designation official. But nobody's come up with the resources and commitments to make it real, and the likelihood that they will is poor. We'll see a functioning airport in Peotone before that happens.

The activists probably look at this from a lawyer's point of view. To a lawyer, if there's even a microminuscule possibility that something is so, then you can't dismiss it as beyond the shadow of a doubt and you might as well run with it. I look at this like a quantum physicist would: just because something is possible doesn't mean it's probable. Sure, in a universe where light can be both wave and particle and Schroedinger's cat can simultaneously be both dead and alive, there's a possibility that everything needed for a real medical district could come together in Roseland – but the probability wave function tells me that I'm far more likely to watch a proton decay spontaneously in front of me (which takes tens of billions of years, at least) than I am to witness a real medical district being developed. So it pains me to see the residents and activists pinning such hopes on this when they should be trying other, more realistic ways of getting business and industry back to that neighborhood.

Why am I so pessimistic? Where to start??

The designation in itself means nothing. The Illinois Medical District up near the Eisenhower is what it is because of the broad variety of medical and allied health schools, organizations, facilities, and institutions that are there – and there are a LOT of each. Does anyone seriously think that similar schools, organizations, facilities and institutions will automatically spring up in Roseland, with or without the designation? Hardly: there's no good reason for them to be there and every reason for them to be up at the IMD.

You only need one big medical district per metropolis, so what is it exactly that the activists and the governor foresee for Roseland? That anyone expects for Roseland? Spell it out for me, folks, because right now this so-called 'vision' of a medical district for Roseland is pretty vague. It's clear that neither the community activists nor anyone else has really thought this through.

Northwestern Memorial Hospital is currently in talks with Roseland Community Hospital; maybe that will result in Northwestern agreeing to use Roseland as a teaching facility, and they'll send some nurses and med students or interns and residents down there, possibly some pharmacists. But how will those nurses, students, interns and residents get there?? They'd have to drive, because public transport to Roseland stinks. Let's go so far as to assume that in this 'vision' the CTA/Metra do put in reliable public transport to Roseland Hospital. Does that mean that suddenly there will be a med school campus or a nursing school, other health care organizations and institutions, and/or a medical technology industrial park there? NO. That's not a given. And without those, what kind of a 'district' do you have? An imaginary one, on paper.

Take a good look at what the IMD includes. Within the IMD itself are:

4 major medical centers;
4 medical institutions;
5 health clinics (not including the ones that are part of the four medical centers);
2 university campuses with medical schools, nursing schools, and schools for allied health professionals, including pharmacists;
13 public service and emergency response agencies, including the Cook County Medical Examiner's office and Forensic Science Institute, Illinois State Police Forensic Science Center at Chicago, and the 311 nonemergency response center;
8 vocational and educational service agencies for the disabled;
2 youth services and two senior services agencies;
4 child care centers;
5 therapeutic day schools for children;
2 high schools (Chicago Hope Academy and UIC Prep);
2 elementary schools; and
5 agencies that are affiliated with the district itself.

The district also includes the headquarters of the American Red Cross of Greater Chicago over at 2200 W.Harrison St., down the block from the county morgue. You can verify it all here.

Then there is the Chicago Technology Park, a plot of 56 acres within the IMD that includes a research center, three enterprise buildings, and about 30 biotech firms, most of which originated in the IMD’s major medical centers and regional institutions of higher education. The Research Center is a 56,000-square-foot, state-run incubator facility with three major lab areas that houses start-up biotech firms until they can 'graduate' to either one of the three nearby enterprise facilities on campus or to other buildings within the CTP. The center has been home to spin-offs from the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, University of Illinois, Argonne National Labs, and other major research institutions. Among the more than 25 'graduate' companies are Amgen, MediChem Life Sciences, United Therapeutics, and Litholink Corp.

Other companies that have facilities within the CTP include LifeScan Chicago, CorDynamics, Inc., Creatv MicroTech, Inc., and Stat Analysis Corp. Those four firms occupy part of Tech 2000, a 70,000-square-foot building at 2242 W. Harrison St. that is owned by UIC, which also houses some of its institutional offices there. Litholink opened its own 11,000-square-foot facility within the CTP in 2001. A complete list of the companies at the CTP can be found here. The CTP is located south of Harrison St. between Damen Ave. and Oakley Ave. You can check out those details here.

Back to my point: How are they going to duplicate even a fraction of this in Roseland? And why should any health care or medical associations, institutions, or medical/tech companies move down there when they have everything they need or want up on the near west side? In the IMD, there's an appropriately skilled workforce in the district, and there's housing, there's synergy; in Roseland, there's nothing. Except poor people and empty lots.

Roseland’s problems began several decades ago. Back during the 1960s, there was heavy industry in nearby Pullman: Pullman-Standard Co. over on 111th Street, which built Amtrak rail cars and commuter rail cars for the CTA and other cities’ mass transit systems, and a Sherwin-Williams paint plant at 115th Street. Both plants overlooked what was then the Calumet Expressway, now the Bishop Ford. You could see them easily when driving down the freeway. Both employed a lot of people – and when they closed, Pullman-Standard during the early 1980s and Sherwin-Williams later, there was no other major employer within either Pullman or Roseland to take up the slack. Other industry also had been leaving, and skilled workers followed the jobs to other areas of the city and to the suburbs. Roseland and Pullman became and still remain a job wasteland. To top it all off, Roseland Hospital isn't in such great shape itself. It would take a big investment to improve those facilities.

Given all this, why would any educational or medical institution, association, organization, or med-tech company come to Roseland? What would be in it for them?

Like I said: the designation of a medical district in Roseland means nothing. It's everything else that matters. And if they had everything else there already, the designation would be a mere formality – the area wouldn't really need it. So how does anyone plan to accomplish this? I'm waiting for concrete details, but I'm not hearing them. Maybe because there aren't any, this has all been wishful thinking on the part of the community, and the designation was a cheap and easy bone for the governor to throw at the clueless activists.

The activists should get less clueless and start looking for other ways to bring work back to the community. Even that will be a long haul, because the skills aren't there, and bringing new skills to those unemployed in Roseland will be a huge task in itself. I wish them the best. I just hope that believing in the myth of the medical district doesn't break their hearts.

2010-07-29T14:30:00.019-05:00

The uninformed public, led by the misinformed 'experts'
posted 7-29-2010 2:51 p.m. Central

Sometimes, disinformation is spread by perfectly well-meaning people who are less informed than they think they are. And they don’t even realize they’re doing it. Trouble is, if their credentials look good at first glance, the rest of us may not realize it, either. This is one of the frustrations of covering health care reform.

Case in point: a New York cardiologist volunteers to provide aid for several months in Haiti after the earthquake. He’s part of a team helping to reinstate cardiac care at a city hospital in Port-au-Prince. A noble deed, well and good. While he’s there, he notices that the “sudden availability in Haiti of free high-quality care from foreign doctors put enormous competitive pressure on the private local doctors, who had already been working under difficult conditions.” This influx of foreign aid causes local clinics to lose business. The cardiologist wonders “if the same would happen to private medical services back in the United States were our government to suddenly provide high-quality, low-cost health care.” So he writes an op-ed piece for the New York Times with suggestions for our health care reform efforts, based on his experience in Haiti.

I begin to see where this guy's argument is going and shake my head, but I keep reading, giving him the benefit of the doubt for the moment. Yet already the misunderstandings are piling up.

In his column, the physician notes several features of Haitian health system – features that generally are not present here – and suggests that we develop public-private partnerships to deliver services to Americans “without destroying our private medical sector.” Sounds good, but it’s misleading on closer examination.

Reading his article, I think: This is what you get when someone who only knows how his own small part of the system works pontificates about changing the system as a whole: bad advice from the insufficiently informed. I ask myself what prompts a physician to do this; does it come from the same mindset that makes some doctors give each other stock tips and take their own financial advice instead of consulting prudent money managers? Is this the arrogance that medical schools instill while training young recruits to be assertive enough to get patient compliance?

The cardiologist mentions the concept of a single-payor system, noting: “Many private health care organizations – primarily for-profit insurance companies – strenuously resisted [including single payor in the reform bill], fearing that if the government suddenly provided high-quality, low-cost care for a significant part of the population, they would lose profits or go out of business. Worries about competition between public and private medicine, in other words, are universal.” Well, not completely: it’s not what I’m worried about.

Three errors here. First, the overwhelming majority of health insurers are not health care organizations. They don’t provide medical care; they merely pay for it. This is an important distinction. Only a comparatively small handful of health plans – namely, staff- or group-model HMOs that operate their own clinics and/or their own hospitals – are in fact health care providers. In short: health insurance is part of the financial services industry, not medicine.

Second, during the last 30 years while I’ve been covering health care, nobody has ever seriously proposed creating an alternative delivery system as part of our reform effort. Third, single payor is not a delivery system: it is a financing mechanism, and the cardiologist-columnist’s failure to understand that is both critical and widespread.

We have two systems in the U.S. that need reform – a financing system that pays for care, and a delivery system that provides care. What’s needed to fix one is different from what would fix the other. Moreover, improving care to get better results for our money is a much longer, more complicated process than changing how we pay for care in order to cover everyone and hold down health premium prices.

In Haiti, an alternative delivery system, however temporary, was necessary because large parts of the local delivery system had been either disabled or destroyed by a natural disaster. Given that the aid doctors provided higher-quality care than the local clinics, it’s unsurprising that Haitians would prefer the foreign doctors for as long as they were there. In that case, setting up a partnership with local physicians and clinics would have helped the Haitians without hurting their providers, who will still be needed there long after the humanitarian volunteers have left.

But that’s not our situation. And single-payor financing doesn’t dictate anything about what our delivery system should look like. Single payor merely means that only one entity is responsible for paying the cost of insuring the entire population. Moreover, this could be done in a way that still lets for-profit insurers participate (although that wouldn’t save us as much money; but that’s a separate discussion).

We have here a well-meaning, respectable doctor who does good works, compassionate and well spoken. The reader naturally attributes a great deal of credibility to his argument. But he's bloody well wrong: this man either hasn’t been following the reform discussion in enough detail or he hasn’t had enough education or involvement in health system operations to realize that there are really two systems involved. Or worse, both are true. And he doesn’t even know enough to realize that he doesn’t know.

If you don’t grasp that there are two systems that need fixing, you’ve misunderstood the very core of the health reform discussion. Moreover, most of the public doesn’t get this distinction yet, either. So how are readers supposed to tell that this doctor’s prescription for reform is erroneous and irrelevant? Answer: They can’t.

Which is why so much of what I write about health care reform involves disabusing well-meaning people of their cherished beliefs. And of course, they still want to shoot the messenger.

2009-07-13T16:12:00.005-05:00

Also missing: better ways to pay doctors and hospitals
posted 6-23-2009 7:50 p.m.; updated 7-13-2009 4:41 p.m.

In my last post, I began a list of what’s missing so far from health care reform efforts:

• enough primary care doctors, primary care nurse practitioners and hospital nurses
• more practitioners and resources in the right places
• better funding mechanisms for practitioner and hospital malpractice insurance
• a national medical malpractice arbitration system to settle most claims, similar to no-fault workers' compensation
• functional, properly financed metro and regional trauma networks
• better physician practice organization
• needed data collection and analysis on a large scale
• a federal privacy czar at cabinet level to monitor and police the privacy and security of consumers' medical, financial and other data and punish offending database owners and other violators

The last entry addressed the first four points. Since then, I’ve come up with two more missing pieces:

• better ways of paying health care practitioners
• better ways of paying hospitals

You’ll notice I didn’t include nursing homes or intermediate care facilities; that’s an entirely separate discussion and a mammoth Gordian knot of its own. Let’s leave that for another time.

By ‘better ways’ I mean mechanisms for paying health care providers that provide reasonable compensation for them without bankrupting the rest of us. But there’s more to it than that.

Saving money is the big reason all would-be reformers give for health care, given how overall health care costs have continued to balloon for the last two decades. That’s nice, as far as it goes. We can discuss which mechanisms are more likely to make the money we spend on health care cost-effective, meaning get the best results for the best price, then discuss what’s more likely to hold costs down. But the first question is: do we save money by paying practitioners and hospitals to do the right thing, or save money (in the short run) by just paying them less? That’s a key decision facing us now and the linchpin of any rational reform plan.

More to the point, before we shovel thousands, if not millions, of uninsured individuals into some new public plan, we have to have payment mechanisms that actually pay health care providers to do the right thing. We don’t have that. Worse, when providers find more efficient and effective ways to provide better care that costs less in the long run, providers usually lose.

You haven’t heard the cost argument articulated that way lately. That’s because nobody in Washington wants to put it in precisely those terms: it might cost more money in the short run to pay doctors and hospitals to do the right thing, and it would certainly require better and different payment systems than are in use now. Clearly, nobody’s volunteering to pay docs bonuses to practice evidence-based medicine at the highest state of the art, which is really too bad because that would mean practicing the most effective medicine. Also, developing such payment mechanisms would take much more time than Congress and the President have to get ‘something’ done quickly, i.e. by August or October, depending on which of those two stated deadlines you choose to believe (I’m really holding out for October, because I’m terrified of what nonsense might get passed in a hurry by August just to get ‘something’ done – BAD idea).

Politicians are already terrified of what it might cost to cover the uninsured, which is why they’re looking for ways to at least fake doing that while costing the federal government as little as possible. Like that can be done (not!). This is why they’d rather just do something simplistic and ineffective that they think they can pass and that still sounds good, until you think about it — like issue an individual mandate, meaning require uninsured people to get health insurance, whether or not they can afford it, without actually making sure that coverage really IS affordable and stays that way through some kind of cost control mechanism. That's the current approach in Congress. Tackling something as complex as provider payment formulas is a conversation they’d much rather not have just now and won't, unless the public steps up and starts demanding it as part of overall heath reform efforts.

The danger with health care reform has always been this: that when we finally had a large enough ‘critical mass’ of (formerly) middle-class people who have lost their health coverage and can’t afford to buy non-group coverage on their own, Congress and the president would suddenly feel enormous pressure to get ‘something’ done quickly – but anything that is done quickly and under that kind of pressure is likely to be a) done badly and b) wrong. Good plans take time to structure and execute correctly, and that’s assuming that you actually want a good, effective plan that addresses what most Americans need and want rather than whatever mish-mash politicians think they can sneak through. Guess which versions of health reform we’re looking at right now (you got it: the sloppy, simplistic, stingy, easier to pass but wrong ones).

Which means that if we want to do something rational and effective now while we work on those complicated issues, we need to give the uninsured some kind of coverage now in a way that doesn’t take a lot of reinvention and that has some safeguards and cost controls already in place – which is why I recommend putting all the uninsured into the Federal Employees Health Benefit Program, but I’ll go into the pros and cons of that next time. For now, let’s discuss those missing payment methods and why that’s a problem, especially for any public health plan alternative that Congress wants to propose.

Here’s the thing: we pay doctors and hospitals to provide services, period. The fewer services they provide, the less they get paid. Mind you, there are ways of checking the bills submitted to make sure what’s paid for isn’t medically unwarranted, but that’s doing things backwards. In paying merely for services rendered, we’re really asking practitioners and hospitals, nursing homes, etc., to choose between doing the right thing for individual patients and doing well enough financially that they can continue to stay in business. There are no monetary rewards for doing good or for doing better than other doctors or hospitals. Not surprising: all payors want to pay less, not hand out bonuses to the best providers.

When you make people choose between doing good and doing well, financial realities force them to choose doing well. It's just a fact. That’s not to say that doctors and hospitals won’t try to do good within the limited parameters given them – most will – but if they come up with a way of doing good that costs less, they usually won’t be compensated for doing that. Rather, they’ll be punished financially for doing the right thing.

The New York Times recently ran an article about hospitals being penalized by Medicare for reducing the number of readmissions following an inpatient stay. It’s just one example of many, but you can see why hospitals would be discouraged from trying to do this.

We’ve known about this dilemma of paying providers to do good versus do well for the last 25 years, but we haven’t done much to change that situation. Sure, we talked about it during the Clinton Administration, but we all know what happened to that attempt at health reform (it went nowhere). Way back in the late 1980s, a for-profit HMO company called U.S. Healthcare developed a pay-for-performance modifier that it applied to provider payment, and Aetna Health Plans inherited that formula when it bought out U.S. Healthcare some years later, but that was an exception. Many physicians contracting with U.S. Healthcare, later Aetna, grumbled about it, too, at the time; but no major players have improved upon that system or use a similar one.

The vast majority of health plans, both private and public (Medicare and Medicaid), still pay only for services provided. And that’s a bad idea, because public and private health plans mainly control costs simply by trying to pay ever less for those services rendered while inflation keeps pushing the cost of those services ever higher. This is an idiotic cycle, but it’s what we have.

All that most insurers have done with managed care plans is negotiate volume discounts with hospitals (that’s the reason for different charges to different patients for the same services); and they pay the majority of practitioners a monthly capitation fee – that is, a flat fee per patient enrolled in a given health plan that’s supposed to cover any physician services provided by that doctor during that month. This is supposed to give doctors an incentive to provide only necessary care, but it’s actually an incentive to simply provide fewer services.

Of course, most doctors aren’t that mercenary, and they usually don’t know which patients are covered by which health plans unless those patients are on Medicare or Medicaid. However, because Medicare and Medicaid rates are notoriously low, too many doctors won’t take Medicare or Medicaid patients unless those patients can pay out of pocket for care (not likely). Saying that a public plan for the uninsured would pay, say, 10 percent more than Medicare rates isn’t saying much and doesn’t guarantee that doctors would be willing to see patients insured by such a public plan.

You would think that enrolling Medicaid and Medicare recipients in managed care plans would be the solution, but it’s not – it’s merely a start, because of the disincentives of capitation that I mentioned earlier. Before you go rabid about managed care and how evil it is, let me point out that most private insurers don’t do much to see that managed care is practiced correctly – they’re only interested in lowering their own costs so that they can maintain their profit margins and keep paying ever higher earnings to stockholders. Because if they don’t pay higher earnings, the bloody-minded, notoriously short-term focused stock market will punish them.

This is where I remind you that free markets are first, last and always about making money, not about doing good or providing public rights – and most Americans consider health care a right, not a privilege, albeit perhaps a limited right like public school education. That’s why most Americans are pissed off about the high cost of health care in the U.S.: they know health care can be literally a matter of life and death, therefore every citizen and legal resident alien deserves access to care. How much and what kind of care is where the crux of the matter lies, at least where the benefit package for any public plan is concerned; but no matter what benefits are covered, we still have to pay for them in a fair and rational manner.

Moreover, practicing managed care the way it’s supposed to be done would be easier if we could simultaneously pay providers to do the right thing. What does managed care really mean, and what’s the critical thing to remember about it? I’m going to quote from my own 1995 book on managed care, Managed Care Strategies, because I made an effort to be precise and I’ve yet to find a more succinct description. The key sentences are in bold type:

… The reasons for supporting the use of managed care are many. But the most compelling one is that the alternative – unmanaged care – is financially, legally, and clinically unjustifiable. To go without managing care is to do a disservice to both the patients and the [health] plan, for which such a course creates potential liability problems.
Managed care seeks to provide the most effective care in an efficient, timely and sensitive manner, at a price that is acceptable to purchasers and still fair to providers. The approach also tries to document a [health] plan’s performance. … We already have an unmanaged [health care] system in the United States wherein people get services with scant regard for need, effectiveness, or cost; it’s called fee-for-service [care], and the nation can’t afford it. …

Traditional Medicare is a fee-for-service system, though with lower payments per service than private payors allow. Discounted fees are still fee for service – you’re still paying for services delivered, whether or not they were the right services or did any good. This is why the federal government started using diagnosis-related groups or DRGs for hospital payments, so that it could pay a flat rate for an entire episode of inpatient care, and physician payments calculated using the resource-based relative value scale or RBRVS, which tries to measure how much effort and how many resources go into a given physician visit for a given purpose.

That would be a good start if it weren’t for the fact that Congress and various administrations have consistently kept trying to ratchet down the payment rates even for those systems. There's always a carefully calculated rate increase, then a cut whenever the federal budget gets tight, which was always during the last three GOP administrations. President Obama and the current Congress are no different: those hospital 'savings' they've been bragging about are really just more cuts in the Medicare payment rate, which means more providers will be dropping out of those programs. In any case, both the Medicaid and Medicare payment systems are broken, and we can't fix them in time to use either as a public plan.

Let’s face it, the feds, like everyone else, just want to pay less for health care because the federal budget is skyrocketing for other ill-conceived reasons left over from Republican administrations, and the ill-conceived war in Iraq and poorly and intermittently fought one in Afghanistan during the Dubya administration simply doubled the size of the national debt and pushed us into the current recession. Paying for better patient outcomes, on the other hand, is complicated by arguments about whose patients were sicker to begin with, which is why it’s going to take time to develop reliable payment systems that have some kind of risk adjustment to them. No quick fix.

So, then: we need to start working right now on those better payment systems with rewards for using best medical practices, so that when we finally have a public plan that works (which will take at least another three to five years to build while we get those other missing pieces into place), we can start paying doctors, hospitals, and other health care providers appropriately – and not undercut health care reform by once again making providers choose between doing the right thing and staying solvent.

And while we work out better ways to pay health care providers, we need to cover the uninsured now. My suggestion: fold them all into the Federal Employees Health Benefit Program (FEHBP) and use federal taxes to subsidize their premiums, based on a sliding scale that considers income and includes everyone under 250 percent of the federal poverty level. More on that next time.

2009-05-12T13:46:00.008-05:00

Fixing health care reform: too many missing pieces now, but we can build on parts that work
posted 5-12-2009 2:17 p.m.

There are those who liken tinkering around the edges of health care reform (which is all Congress and the president have attempted, so far) to fixing a leaky faucet or unclogging a drain in New Orleans while Hurricane Katrina approaches: there’s a much bigger picture that needs to be addressed. I agree with that last part, but to me the health care system is more of a Rube-Goldberg machine or a potential This Old House project: it began long ago with a very small core and was slowly cobbled together over time to do more and more but performs in a costly, roundabout, less than effective way — yet our attempts to improve it have only resulted in more things cobbled on, without rethinking the entire design.

With the rising clamor for a public health insurance plan as an alternative mechanism for covering everyone, it’s time to think about whether or not we have the pieces of the delivery system in place to make a public health plan effective. I don’t think we do. However, we do have pieces that are useful now and would be good to incorporate into any reformed delivery system. We have to retain those parts while we figure out what our care system needs to look like, which will determine what our reform plan must look like.

(Will the proposals offered by the industry coalition in May help? Oh, hell NO: those pointy-headed jackals have assessed the president’s clout with the public and, having decided he’s more of a conciliator than a hard-liner, are trying to make an end-run around him and offer something that sounds good but is really trivial – which is why it’s helpful for Mr. Obama to have a pit bull with a long memory like Rahm Emanuel on board. Economist and long-time health care reform advocate Paul Krugman may be cheered by the alleged industry detente, but I'm not. But I digress ...)

Note that health insurance isn’t part of the delivery system but is instead a financing mechanism for making access to care possible — a necessary but insufficient condition for real access. We really do need to quickly cover a lot of uninsured and underinsured people in a way that gives them real access to care without bankrupting them – but unless we begin serious, effective delivery system reforms simultaneously, giving uninsured people health coverage is just a cruel, empty promise and a guarantee of chaos.

Here’s my list so far about what’s missing:

• enough primary care doctors, primary care nurse practitioners and hospital nurses
• more practitioners and resources in the right places
• better funding mechanisms for practitioner and hospital malpractice insurance
• a national medical malpractice arbitration system to settle most claims, similar to no-fault workers' compensation
• functional, properly financed metro and regional trauma networks
• better physician practice organization
• needed data collection and analysis on a large scale
• a federal privacy czar at cabinet level to monitor and police the privacy and security of consumers' medical, financial and other data and punish offending database owners and other violators

Let’s start with the personnel problem. Based on experience in states like Massachusetts that have a public health insurance program, the most pressing need is for more primary care doctors and nurses. If we cover everyone with decent health insurance, the medical infrastructure will need more doctors and nurses immediately.

The only specialists we need more of are in ob-gyn, pediatrics, geriatrics, rheumatology (possibly), and infectious disease, given our changing demographics and the increase in drug-resistant infections. We'll also need more epidemiologists to study what works in medicine, and more medical researchers. We won't get enough of those if we keep dumping huge medical school and graduate school expenses on students — we'll only get more surplus specialists, because they're the only ones who can charge enough to repay those outrageous loans.

The other reason oft cited for the increase in specialists is that they’re the only ones who earn enough to afford expensive malpractice insurance. It seems like we’re treated almost weekly to stories about one doctor or another who quit caring for patients because he or she couldn’t afford malpractice coverage anymore. I hate stories like that because anecdotes don’t give me any indication of whether or not the example being discussed represents average experience or is an exception. However, there is enough evidence that a significant percentage of physicians, more in some specialties and fewer in others, really are having trouble staying in practice because of high malpractice premiums.

Moreover, we don’t have a good distribution of doctors and nurses. We’ve had a shortage of hospital nurses for several years. Similarly, there aren’t enough primary care practitioners, both doctors and nurse practitioners, in rural and inner-city areas. Yet the incentives we’ve used clearly aren’t doing the job.

So: here are four missing pieces to add to our reform effort:

• We need a guaranteed way to increase the number of primary care doctors being graduated and cut the number of specialists. That means quotas. Targets aren’t enough, because we need rapid turnaround. I’m not a lover of quotas, but the AMA, medical specialty societies, and medical schools have known ever since the 1980s that we need more doctors in primary care, yet they haven’t acted. President Obama needs to have a come-to-Jesus meeting next week with the heads of the AMA, medical specialty societies, and the American Association of Medical Colleges and read them the riot act: either you folks impose quotas or find some other mechanism within the next three to four months to limit the number of specialists, or the feds will do it for you. End of discussion.

• We need to lower medical school and postgraduate training costs for primary care doctors and nurse practitioners while putting them where they’re needed. To this end, existing federal loan forgiveness programs that place doctors in underserved areas need to be greatly expanded. If you’re in primary care or a hospital-based nurse, your remaining school loans will be subsidized in full if you relocate and practice in targeted underserved areas for a minimum of 10 years. That’s the carrot. A decade is long enough that those doctors and nurses will be far more likely to stay in both primary care and in locations where they’re most needed. However, if they leave either primary care or targeted locales in less than 10 years, they must start paying back their loans — in full. That’s the stick.

• We need to redesign malpractice insurance funding and quickly institute new mechanisms. My recommendation: a national insurance program that is operated by the states but supervised by a federal agency, has in each state one big insurance pool for all hospitals and one for all doctors and nurse practitioners, and is financed by malpractice premiums plus municipal bonds issued through state health care financing agencies. Premiums will be paid to the state pools. Each pool will have reinsurance issued by private carriers, in the same way that malpractice insurers now reinsure their own risk. This means medical malpractice insurers will lose a lot of business (they’ll still have the dentists), but their best employees can always work for the state insurance pools, whereas reinsurers will continue to do what they do best. This makes more sense than the current system. Besides, malpractice insurers were never guaranteed a living; they need to deal with that.

Also, malpractice insurance needs to operate more along the lines of workers' compensation, settling claims quickly and making patients better without bankrupting anyone, while using risk management to direct practitioners and facilities that fail more often than average to better retraining and targeted continuing education. The state risk pools are better for accomplishing that; but all hospitals, doctors and nurse practitioners would have to be in the pools for them to work properly.

• We need a uniform medical malpractice arbitration system to settle most claims and send only the most egregious cases to local courts. Arbitrators would receive training in understanding medical data and expert testimony. Again, the goal here, as with no-fault workers’ comp, is to quickly do what’s best medically for injured patients while retaining the availability of litigation for cases that really warrant it. Moreover, with national health insurance, patients would be covered for medical care, whereas malpractice awards would go for other costs that health insurance normally doesn’t cover, such as long-term care or custodial care at home. Again, this would be a national system run state by state but federally funded through income taxes. Another cost up front, but it’s necessary to reduce overall health care and court costs over the longer term.

The insurance industry will no doubt start screaming immediately, but malpractice insurance as it is now isn't working well, and those insurers need to go the way of the buggy whip: they're equally outdated. The trial attorneys will really hate the part about arbitration for most cases, but they, too, have had 20 years to devise a better system and failed, so their complaints are moot. Too bad. But no crocodile tears for them: they’ll still have more than enough personal injury cases from other causes to keep them busy.

Finally, these measures must be put in place now because it will take several years for them to produce significant effects — but we’ll go broke as a nation if we don’t start now. The economists over at the Office of Management and Budget and the Congressional Budget Office and others who complain about how much this will add to the budget deficit really need to ‘get’ that and get out of the way. Mr. Obama does: we’re talking short-term pains for long-term gains.

Moreover, we can’t get everyone covered without huge delays for all but emergency care without making these changes. Sure, even if we implement them now, there’s going to be a tricky adjustment period for an unknown number of months, but at least it won’t be complete and utter chaos — which is what we’ll have otherwise.

And not insuring everyone (status quo) isn’t an option: that’s simply more expensive to the nation as a whole and to individuals, and deadly for some.

2009-03-02T18:46:00.014-06:00

Sebelius, DeParle will have their work cut out for them
posted 3-2-2008 7:46 p.m.

The Obama Administration today announced the nominations of its top two health care officials. In appointing two different people for those positions, the administration wisely reversed itself. Each of the nominees will have more than enough to do, once they are approved.

Earlier today, Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius(D) accepted the nomination for Secretary of Health and Human Services, replacing former senator Thomas A. Daschle, who withdrew from consideration last month after his tax problems and position as a lobbyist complicated matters for the Obama Administration. Also, Nancy-Ann DeParle was named director of the White House Office for Health Reform. DeParle headed the Health Care Financing Administration, which oversaw Medicare and Medicaid, during the Clinton Administration. She was also a Clinton era health care adviser at HHS and at the White House Office of Management and Budget.

Previously, Mr. Daschle had successfully negotiated to hold both positions, a concept some thought a bad idea because of the sheer amount of work that would be involved. I objected for other reasons. First, the position of HHS Secretary is essentially administrative: someone has to make sure the agencies and departments run well. Second, being the point person for health care reform is in itself a full-time job. It helps to know how HHS runs, but HHS itself won't be the primary focus of the health reform czar (or in this case, czarina): fixing the financing and delivery systems will. Third, health care reform will take a long time -- perhaps as long as 10 to 15 years -- but once the direction has been set firmly in motion and both the financing and delivery systems begin to show significant results, the health care reform director's position isn't really a permanent one. It's not like being the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors: a president will always need the latter. If the director of health care reform does her job well, she will eventually eliminate her own position.

I was, perhaps, one of the very few progressive analysts who was relieved by Tom Daschle's withdrawal mainly for health policy reasons. I admire much of what Mr. Daschle has accomplished over the years, and he certainly does understand how much of the system works, but I cringed at his notion of creating yet more federal bureaucracy to accomplish ongoing health care reform. That's unnecessary. Much can be accomplished by delegating work to existing agencies within HHS and creating a committee or commission or two within HHS to accomplish the rest. While Mr. Daschle was still the HHS nominee, there was every indication that his own ideas would hold sway and that President Obama would likely defer to many of them. This no longer appears to be the case, thank heavens. Of course, now I worry that the president will defer too much to Sen. Ted Kennedy, but that's a different conversation.

Gov. Sebelius's previous position as state insurance commissioner will serve her well. She certainly knows the problems consumers have with health insurers and while commissioner opposed the financial rationing of care by health plans and premature hospital discharges. However, during her two terms as governor, Sebelius was unsuccessful in pushing for significant improvements in health coverage or costs. In this, she is not unique among governors. Still, she's reportedly a wonk on health policy, not unlike Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and at least has a realistic idea of what she's up against on health policy issues.

DeParle, meanwhile, has been out of government for a while. She was Tennessee commissioner of human services during the late 1980s. After her stint in the Clinton Administration, DeParle went private. Currently, she is a managing partner with the private equity firm CCMP Capital Advisors LLC and is on the boards of Cerner, Medco Health Solutions and Boston Scientific, two of which are medical technology companies and one of which manages pharmacy programs. On one hand, this is less of an obstacle because DeParle isn't being nominated to the cabinet; on the other hand, she'll still have to resign all those positions and is expected to recuse herself from matters that would directly affect any of these firms in a significant way.

Nevertheless, having been head of HCFA, DeParle should certainly understand the problems facing Medicare and Medicaid in detail. Her experience at OMB will have given her perspective on how health care costs play out in the federal budget, which means she should be able to anticipate and work around, if not refute, some of the objections others will no doubt raise about attempting costly reform mechanisms.

I haven't seen anything yet regarding what reform position, if any, DeParle has favored in the past -- employer mandate, individual mandate, some combination of the two, or some version of national health insurance, with or without single payor -- but I wish I knew. There are some in Congress, including Sen. Kennedy, Sen. Max Baucus, Rep. Henry Waxman, and others, who have their own ideas about what health care reform should include, and no doubt they're already pushing behind the scenes to influence which way the president leans. It would certainly help to know which way DeParle leans -- and whether or not she can push back gently but firmly against both Congressional forces and people like Rahm Emanuel and his recently nearly as visible brother, Ezekiel Emanuel (yet another newbie theorist who's written his own manifesto on health care reform; trust me, it's a yawn, though I'm sure his brothers don't think so).

It also remains to be seen how much public support the president will give DeParle as his point person on this issue. Let's hope it's enough to keep her independent and open minded, looking for mechanisms that actually work rather than following anyone's party line. That would be refreshing.

It's also refreshing to see two smart, powerful women named to these positions. It signals the president's continuing effort to get good people who also reflect the nation as a whole. About time.

2009-02-24T07:40:00.008-06:00

Health insurance is a big deal, Mr. Obama, so take a little time to get it right

posted 2-24-2008 8:22 a.m.

The problem with most backroom deals in politics is that they’re completed in everything short of a vote before the public even knows about them. Average Americans like you and me have no opportunity to influence the result, yet often we’re the ones most affected – sometimes most adversely affected – by the result. Such a backroom deal on health insurance reform is afoot right now, led by none other than Ted Kennedy. And President Obama appears to have signed off on it. I'm betting it's what he presents tonight in his address to the nation.

Senator Kennedy has long wanted health care reform and championed that cause, even for a time favoring a single payor plan not unlike Medicare. That he should be talking to stakeholders is not the concern. He wants to accomplish something lasting on health care before he dies. But national health insurance, or even something close to it, is a far cry from what’s on the table now – and what is under discussion is more a full-employment plan for the insurance industry with you and me footing the bill than what most Americans want.

Last Thursday, Robert Pear of The New York Times reported that Sen. Kennedy has been having closed-door meetings with lobbyists representing a range of interest groups, including some that helped defeat the Clinton plan 15 years ago, to find some consensus. What they’ve agreed is to leave consumers holding the bag: an individual mandate. It means you’ll be responsible for buying your own health insurance – and for all too many of us, that means another hole in our pockets. We won’t be able to get group rates: we’ll be paying higher premiums than anyone else.

An individual mandate simply preserves the intolerable status quo on everything that’s wrong with health insurance now, without fixing anything, and forces people to buy whatever these stakeholders agree on, even if it’s the wrong thing and too expensive for most of us. And we don’t have any say. In this economy? And we’re supposed to accept this?? That’s just a recipe for disaster. How did the Obama Administration let this happen? More to the point, why? Perhaps an overworked Obama with other things on his plate simply trusts the senator too much.

That Ted Kennedy would agree to this now is deeply disappointing but not incomprehensible. The Obama Administration seems to have lost significant momentum with the delays over the economic stimulus package, TARP, the partisan intransigence of the Republicans, and the demise of Tom Daschle. I understand that Kennedy wants to get at least something done before he dies – but this is really the wrong something. It’s merely the easiest thing for him to get consensus on. In this case, this particular something is NOT better than nothing, and in his heart Kennedy must know that. Yet pressure to make it at least look like there’s progress is increasing as the number of uninsured and unemployed jumps higher.

When Congress is forced to act quickly, as with bailing out the banks and financial firms, what is done is likely to be done badly, with insufficient oversight, and will take years to undo, if ever. We’ve already made that mistake with the banks now and the savings and loans 20 years ago; surely Mr. Obama doesn’t want to get caught in a similar hasty trap on health insurance. If so, he’d better start paying attention and head off Sen. Kennedy’s dealmaking for an individual mandate.

That the other stakeholders involved would agree to an individual mandate without regard to what the rest of us want is no surprise: it would cost them almost nothing. Employers have long been afraid that government would impose an employer mandate instead, requiring every employer regardless of size to provide health benefits (a move that unions prefer but one that has small businesses terrified); so corporations see this as an opportunity to rid themselves of an enormous expense that they’ve been steadily shifting to their workers anyway over the last two decades or trying to escape entirely. Employers are glad of an opportunity to duck responsibility for paying their share of health premiums, especially now. Insurers see an opportunity to make more money while still cherry-picking enrollees and without really having to change how they do business, whereas unions have lost so much of their power and are so worn down from simply trying to preserve their members’ jobs that they’re willing to make concessions not exactly in their members’ (and our) best interest. And health care providers just want to get paid – more people with coverage means fewer people who can’t pay their hospital and doctor bills.

But wait – who’s missing here? You got it: we, the people most affected, who will have to live with the resulting mess and pay for the privilege. For way too long, insured people haven’t had any say about what coverage they’ve been given or what it should include, and now Sen. Kennedy wants to enshrine this inequality into law. Just because he can get the other stakeholders to agree on something doesn’t mean that what they agree on is what we want or need or what will work best over the long term. And the individual mandate is none of those things.

The first thing wrong with the individual mandate is that it does nothing to hold down premium costs. Insurers will still be able to jack up premium prices whenever they want. They do it to employers, union groups, and associations all the time. The only effective way to hold down premium costs is to have leverage through a single program like, say, Medicare or Medicaid. Then you have real negotiating clout. But because insurers still have the non-poor, non-retiree market to go to for enrollees, many choose not to participate in or drop out of Medicare and Medicaid. However, if everyone is folded into a single plan so that one agency negotiates terms for all, plans have no choice to but deal with that agency and agree to its terms if they want to stay in that business.

You can see why insurers would balk at that, and yet many still do contract with both Medicare and Medicaid, which means the terms aren’t completely disagreeable. There’s no reason that kind of cost control shouldn’t be used on behalf of the rest of us, and plenty of reasons – particularly in this economy – why it should. I don’t see most of the general public crying for the insurers on this.

The second reason the individual mandate is a terrible idea is that it perpetuates a pricing structure and sales practices insurers use to choose only enrollees they think will cost them the least money in claims. It still allows insurers ways to limit or deny coverage to some people while favoring others. Oh sure, you can make it illegal for insurers to deny coverage or charge outrageously higher premiums that force people to either look elsewhere or buy drastically inadequate coverage, but who’s going to enforce that, and how? What’s the penalty for breaking such a law? And will it really be painful enough to discourage insurers’ bad behavior? I’m betting not. Government has a lousy record of policing insurers.

Third, simply forcing people to buy some kind of coverage, whether it’s adequate, affordable, and appropriate or not, does nothing to hold down overall health care costs. That’s a whole different set of solutions, one that will take years longer to affect with the status quo. Why? Because we really have two systems to fix here -- the health care financing system, which is the insurance end, and the health care delivery system, which includes doctors, hospitals and all other providers. Solutions to fix one won't fix the other and vice versa.

Meanwhile, most health insurance products are supposedly some flavor of managed care (HMOs or PPOs), but most insurers don’t know how to run managed care other than to negotiate provider discounts, limit reimbursement, or deny claims. Because that’s how they run their other insurance products. But managed care isn’t an insurance model or product: it’s a way of practicing medicine and providing care. Insurers really do very little to affect care other than to deny it by denying payment (things are different with group/staff model HMOs, which can and do affect medical practice, but I digress). The nasty little secret is that health insurance is a far different animal than any other kind of insurance, and most insurers haven’t figured that out at this late date.

Think about it: with any other kind of insurance – homeowner’s, automobile, disability, flood insurance, business liability, fire and marine, whatever – you pay a premium and hope to God never to have to make a claim. That may have been the case with health insurance a century ago, when medicine couldn’t do much more than set broken bones and amputate crushed or gangrenous limbs, but it isn’t the case now.

Health insurance today is not protection against rare events but a means to an end, a way to pay for care that you expect right from the start to need on a more or less regular basis. An insured person gets health insurance fully expecting to make use of it, and sooner rather than later: research tells us that we should seek care promptly, that early treatment is more effective and less expensive than delayed care, and that prevention is far better and cheaper than cure. This is precisely why having copayments and deductibles that discourage people from immediately seeking care when they need it is such a stupid idea: it costs us all far more in the end. Moreover, high out-of-pocket health care costs really do keep people from getting care and are one of the top reasons people declare bankruptcy. Until the economy went south, health care debts were the top reason.

There is nothing about forcing people to buy their own health insurance that guarantees it will truly be affordable (instead of some well-off conservative’s pipedream of what ‘affordable’ means), that it will be adequate, or that it will have limits on out-of-pocket costs that will keep people from delaying care or going bankrupt if they do get care. The only thing we are guaranteed is that most, if not all, of the cost will fall on us and that it will fall unfairly on those who can afford it the least. Moreover, telling people that they can join ‘buying pools’ to lower their costs is an illusion and just perpetuates the same unfair variable pricing structure that people hate now. Besides, if putting people into big risk pools is such a great idea, then putting everyone into one giant national risk pool ought to be a terrific idea – and it is. It's called single payor.

What Americans want is health insurance with some fairness to it – a plan that doesn’t discriminate, that covers everybody, that has the same premium rates for everyone regardless of who they work for or where they live. They want coverage that has a decent comprehensive benefit package to cover preventive, primary and acute care, out-of-pocket costs that don’t discourage people from seeking care promptly and won’t bankrupt them when the bills come, and coverage they can keep no matter where they move or whether or not they’re employed. And they want a plan with premiums that don’t keep rising faster than all other costs except the Iraq war. Any number of polls over the years will confirm this, and Sen. Kennedy knows it even if Mr. Obama doesn’t. However, the only thing that will meet all these requirements is a national health insurance program administered by a single federal agency with the clout and mandate to standardize benefits, set terms and performance requirements for all participating plans, and leverage enough to negotiate lower premiums for all.

If Sen. Kennedy tries to ram through an individual mandate now, it won’t matter how many illusory accompanying schemes claiming to make coverage affordable he tacks on to it – his proposal still won’t come close to covering everyone, it won’t hold down costs, and it won’t be affordable to those who can’t buy coverage now. What it will do is make a lot of people angry once they figure out that the plan has dumped yet another expensive financial obligation on them, just as they’re struggling to hold on to their jobs and homes and pay their bills. Just as the economy continues to worsen. And if the president endorses Kennedy’s plan, people will blame Mr. Obama when it costs too much and doesn’t work as promised.

Sen. Kennedy needs to stop obsessing about his legacy, stop trying to find the lowest common denominator that makes the lobbyists happy, and start listening to the one set of stakeholders that counts: the voters. And the president should take more time to get his health care proposals right. Or else the senator and President Obama will soon discover that a bad proposal that dumps the most of the costs on voters is the quickest way to push them back into the arms of the GOP.

2009-01-28T15:46:00.007-06:00

Health reform debates during the Obama Administration’s first week
posted 1-28-2009 3:50 p.m.

In a week in which 10,000 jobs were lost in a single day, with more losses to come in the months ahead, the weak health care spending measures meant to cover more children and unemployed are already virtually moot. Unless Congress snaps to and suddenly realizes its gross underfunding, the monies intended to expand coverage won’t even give the states enough to maintain status quo. And the states aren’t waiting: they’re already cutting back.

There is a solution, but the Democrats would have to be uncommonly brave to take it on. And they’d have to push aside all but a mere handful of moderate conservative Republicans to get it done. The economic disaster is of great enough proportions to justify it; but that doesn’t mean the majority in the House and Senate will work up the nerve and twist enough moderate arms to get it done. And they're in too big of a hurry, as is the President.

Unemployment is up in all 50 states, says today’s Wall Street Journal. No job sector has been spared. States’ unemployment funds are nearly empty, if not already bankrupt. This is the worst unemployment situation inn the last 60 years. The economy is spiraling downward rapidly, and long before the federal funds in the stimulus package reach the states, considerably more money will be needed just to keep the current number of enrollees from being booted out of Medicaid. The funding being discussed now will only allow the states to tread water: it won’t in any way even begin to cover the people who are unemployed and uninsured now — never mind those who will become unemployed over the next 12 to 18 months. Congress is already losing the race.

Medicaid enrollment is bursting at the seams, doubled in many states compared to a year ago, just as state budgets are shrinking drastically. Having already cut provider reimbursements and delayed payments as much as they can, some states are now cutting Medicaid benefits and squeezing tight their eligibility requirements to reduce the beneficiary totals.

Bitter irony: there might have been enough to cover some of those newly unemployed applicants if it weren’t for the fact that more than three-quarters of the Medicaid dollar goes to cover care for the disabled and elderly. Translation: nursing home care, something that Medicaid was never supposed to pay for — but which Congress, in its cowardice about covering nursing home costs directly under Medicare, where every elderly person would be eligible, let slide into Medicaid instead, thereby eating away at benefits that otherwise would have covered more poor and uninsured children and their mothers. The reason there have to be separate children’s state health insurance programs is because Medicaid money gets diverted from its original purpose.

Now President Obama and the Congress want to let workers who get unemployment apply for Medicaid. Just when the states are actively trying to keep more people out of Medicaid because there’s not enough money to cover the enrollment increase during the last 12 months. Congress and the president must know by now that unemployment won’t stop next week just because they’ve passed a bill. Things are going to get still worse: the states that were first to feel the downturn — those heavily dependent on home construction and manufacturing — are getting worse, not better. The economy hasn’t bottomed out yet and may not for as long as a year..

Trying to provide coverage for the unemployed is a necessity — the nation needs this if we are ever to recover economically. But in being timid about amounts and means, Congress and the president are far behind the curve, will only dig themselves (and us) in deeper by taking half-measures, and are guaranteed to fail in their promises to the unemployed.

By trying to fold in health ‘reform’ measures into the stimulus bill instead of taking another month or so to think through what we really need and how much we have to pay to get there, Congress is rushing headlong and blindly into mistakes that may take us years to undo, if we can undo them later.

Now that there is huge pressure to get something done quickly, it will be, as I said earlier, likely done badly. Unless wiser heads than Secretary Daschle’s see opportunity in the chaos and are prepared to take a completely different approach, one that many in the health care and insurance industries won’t like but will be forced to swallow sooner or later. It’s just that, high as the cost may be now, it will still be cheaper to tackle now rather than later.

I am, of course, referring to honest-to-God national health insurance. For a debunking of the myths surrounding what universal coverage really means, see my earlier post on Getting the health care discussion wrong. We face an avalanche of unemployed and uninsured, whereas Mr. Daschle and his colleagues propose a flyswatter to fend it off. All sane analysts admit that the health system is broken and needs drastic revamping. To cobble little tweaks and massive IT spending onto the status quo is like pasting band-aids and Post-Its onto a building that is collapsing.

More to the point, there are two parallel systems that need fixing: the heath care financing system, and the health care delivery system. Getting everybody covered with health insurance is a necessary but insufficient condition to giving them actual access to care when and where they need it. Massachusetts and Vermont have previewed for us the backlog and waiting lists that can be expected if the needed care providers and resources aren’t in place. So there are some things that must be accomplished simultaneously first, then other things that must be done in order. And fixing the delivery system will take much longer than simply covering everyone.

So start in the logical place. Three things must be done at once:

First, get everyone into one, simplified health plan and give the reins of that program to an agency that is already doing the job fairly well: the Federal Employees Health Benefit Program. FEHBP contracts with HMOs and PPOs in every state, meaning everywhere there are federal employees. It already has performance standards for these health plans and knows how to negotiate with them; folding everyone into FEHBP will finally give it some real clout to hold down premium costs. In fact, this is the *only* way anyone can hold down premium increases: nothing else will do it. Moreover, FEHBP already has a sensible comprehensive basic benefit package that only needs to be amended slightly to bring it in line with the Federal HMO Act of 1974 and its amendments (the HMO Act is, by the way, the only decent basic benefit package that anyone would actually want; all it lacks is certain benefits for the elderly, like coverage for mammograms, and coverage for women’s reproductive services, including birth control and abortion services. And the conservatives who don’t like it can go hang: they lost the election and had to know this was coming; better to act fast and give the people what they need ). Fold all Medicaid beneficiaries, unemployed and uninsured persons in first (say, within the next two months), and four months after that, start folding in Medicare beneficiaries. Everyone who already has health insurance can be phased in over the following six to 12 months.

Second, while this is happening, you need to make sure there will be enough primary care doctors and nurses. There aren’t enough now, despite the fact that the medical schools have seen this coming for 20 years — so make the existing ones and the soon-to-graduate doctors and nurses a deal: stay 10 years minimum in primary care after you finish your internship and residency, and the feds will wipe out your med school or nursing school debt. Provide care in an undeserved area, like a rural town or the inner city, and the feds will also give you some cash toward your malpractice insurance premiums (but if you go into a non-primary care specialty before the 10 years is up, you’ll have to repay the school loan). Meanwhile, the president needs to call in all the medical school and medical specialty society presidents for a come-to-Jesus meeting and hand them an ultimatum: either start putting quotas on non-primary-care specialties, or the feds will do it for you. Primary care specialties include family or general medicine, pediatrics, obstetrics and gynecology, geriatrics and rheumatology, and, given the possibilities for epidemics, infectious disease specialists. Viruses and microbes mutate and evolve far faster than we do, and they trade genes with others of their kind, thus passing on immunities to drugs they haven’t been exposed to yet. It’s scary, and we need to be prepared to deal with that.

Third, we need more than just personnel in the right place: we have to fix regional trauma systems and put new ones in where they haven’t been for ages, because trauma systems in most states have broken down. Having health coverage is meaningless if nobody will bring you to the place where they can best care for you in an emergency within that golden hour that saves lives. And this is assuming that there IS an appropriate place the paramedics can take you within that golden hour. Luckily, once everyone is covered by health insurance, hospitals will no longer have to either turn away the uninsured or push that cost onto other patients — and hospitals will be able to afford to keep their ERs open and staffed for true emergencies. Which is why you’ll then *need* to designate as trauma units only those hospitals that are best situated and staffed for that purpose: we don’t need every hospital to have a top-level ER because that wastes money and doesn’t let the best hospital ERS get enough cases for their doctors and nurses to stay sharp and effective. Patient volume really makes a difference in how good a trauma unit gets; so do resources, which more top hospitals will have when they’re not trying to care for the uninsured. There may still be a small need for charity care for the few who fall through the cracks, but it won’t be anything like the dysfunction and financial deceit we have now.

Once Congress has accomplished this much with the financing and manpower situations, it can take another few months to think through reforms for the health care delivery system. Changes meant to improve the quality and effectiveness of care will take much longer to achieve, and this is the point at which we start to discuss electronic patient records. Computerizing patient records won’t save any money for years, because first you have to buy and implement the systems, and that takes time. But before that, the IT industry had damned well better solve the bigger problem: privacy and security. I’ve said it before: we really need a privacy czar in the Cabinet to make sure that neither people’s financial and credit records nor their medical records end up in the wrong hands. There are already way too many databases that have information they’re not entitled to, and we need an agency that can walk in unannounced, like OSHA does in factories, and force those databases to be purged, and fine those guilty very heavily for every day those records remain in their possession. Then the really hard part begins: making sure that nobody’s medical records get hacked. Just as there are professional hackers who steal credit records and sell them to others for illegal purposes, once your medical records are computerized there will be someone just as likely to steal those and sell them. Do you doubt it? Just wait.

By the way, letting Microsoft into this medical records computerization project is a really bad idea. Ever notice how many times evil hackers launch viruses, trojans and worms at programs just because Microsoft wrote them? What do you imagine they’ll do once your medical records are running on a Microsoft platform?? Yeah. Be afraid. Be very afraid. Microsoft shouldn’t be involved.

There’s already an agency within the federal Department of Health and Human Services that is dedicated to health care policy and research, including things like best medical practices, practice guidelines, and clinical decisionmaking systems. It’s called the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. Congress shouldn’t give Mr. Daschle yet another bureaucracy to spearhead reform efforts — give that job to AHRQ, seeing as how it’s doing much of the heavy lifting. Besides, once everyone is insured through FEHBP, the feds can get rid of the agency that runs Medicare and Medicaid, thus resulting in one less bureaucracy in DC and removing a financial burden from the states, all in one fell swoop. Simplify, ladies and gentlemen; don’t cobble more on to the broken Rube Goldberg machine we have now. Besides, Secretary Daschle really will have more than enough to do without adding more turf to his domain. Honest.

And that’s a good start.

With the majority leaders and whips holding all the Democrats in line and Sen. Reid and Speaker Pelosi making nice with the moderate Republicans, this could all squeak through without any help from the rest of the GOP. Let them squeal. Ignore them, gentlepersons of the Congress, and get to work with forethought, care, wisdom, and much boldness. You have a mandate: use it.

Waiting for bipartisanship is useless and a waste of time when the GOP has shown itself as intransigent and clueless as it has ever been in the last 28 years. The GOP had the last eight years to demonstrate that they could lead and failed miserably, giving us a year-long (so far) recession that looks headed for a depression. The Republicans now either need to follow President. Obama’s lead, or get out of the way. They’ve exhausted their other options. They just haven’t grasped that yet.

Time’s a-wasting.

2009-01-14T19:16:00.015-06:00

A workforce for today and tomorrow
posted 1-15-2009 3:03 a.m.

President Obama is saying all the right things about rebuilding not just the physical infrastructure of the nation, but also the workforce infrastructure, in that he thinks there's plenty of opportunity to create new jobs by encouraging the proliferation of newer, greener industries. He's right, as far as that goes — but who's going to be the innovators of those industries if not scientists and engineers, those folks we need but don't have enough of? Not only do we not respect those people we call geeks, we don't graduate enough of them for this future workforce.

Mr. Obama's got to do a lot of fast talking and faster planning to solve this situation before he can convince Congress — because Congress is way behind on this issue. And the Republicans don't even want to discuss it, because of what the funding consequences have to be in order to bring about the goal of more scientists and engineers. Better science and math education in grade and high schools is barely a start: it's college programs that really make the difference and will produce results sooner.

China now graduates five or six times as many scientists, engineers and mathematicians as we do. This is a national security issue for us, not just an economic problem. Unless our universities can keep up by graduating more citizen students who stay here, they too will begin to wither and lose their edge, just like Detroit has — and that edge is not so easy to regain in academia: once you've begun to lose funding, you start to lose faculty (they go elsewhere, even abroad) and then standing. That faculty is difficult to replace, and their replacement (if you can accomplish that at all) takes time. More time than we can spare, so we'd better not have a faculty brain drain here.

So, here's the dilemma, summed up in two headlines:

College May Become Unaffordable for Most in U.S.

Harvard's Endowment Takes an $8 Billion Hit, Loses 22% Of Its Value

If Harvard's getting hit, you know every other college is having an even harder time, state universities included. Is it time to return to full government scholarships for science, math, IT, and engineering degrees for those who can keep up their grades? You bet. Some assistance for those who go to tech schools or community colleges, but full tilt for all those who keep up their grades in the critical areas of study at four-year colleges and universities. We need a lot more than just a handful of National Merit scholars, and we need those students to study something more than English lit, computer game design, or psychology.

Let me add here that when I talk about graduating more scientists and engineers, I'm including in this group more mathematicians and more information technology/computer science grads. And by the latter, I mean non-entertainment IT: the video game designers and CGI techs can pay for their own education. They'll certainly make enough money in the future to repay their loans.

That probably also means a big funding program for teaching science and math properly in high school and middle schools, without which we won't have enough qualified students to earn those new college scholarships. Yes, this means teaching with materials that mention Darwin, evolution, and the Big Bang — it's time for new federal mandates on classroom books for science and math to override local school boards: along with the money, school districts will have to take books that meet the federal standards.

The people who usually evaluate books on local school boards simply aren't competent to choose books suitable for providing kids with an education that qualifies them for college. The late physicist Richard Feynman was once on a textbook committee, and he was appalled by the parochialism and incompetence he found. And what he found isn't an exception.

To get people who are competent to choose the right grade school and high school science and math textbooks, you need a national panel of qualified academics chosen by the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering with a few award-winning high school science and math teachers thrown in for good measure. And NO, there IS no good reason why kids in Kansas or Louisiana should have significantly different science and math textbooks than those in New York, Chicago or Seattle. That's crap promulgated by religious nutcases and states' rights fanatics. And local parents should have no more direct say about which textbooks their kids use than they do about whether or not they pay their taxes.

Our children, no matter where they live, should all be studying the same material and be at the same level nationally, just as is the case in Japan, or Germany, or China, or Australia. So let the NAS- and NAE-chosen committee come up with a list of acceptable books for each grade, from which individual school systems can choose. At least that way, they'll be choosing appropriate books no matter which ones they pick from the list.

Private scholarship programs aren't enough to produce the number of scientists, IT people, mathematicians and engineers we need, and neither are loan programs. We don't want to burden these kids with loans as big as those for medical schools now — we want them in the job market, creating wealth and saving money. Shouldn't we be talking about a full-scholarship program sponsored by DARPA, NAS or NAE, the Institute of Medicine, the National Research Council, perhaps even NASA or NOAA, even if those graduates never end up in government jobs? Ideally, we want most of those graduates to go into private business after college and innovate, innovate, innovate — including figure out how to manufacture those things we invent for less than anyone else can make them, without NOT paying a living wage. Who studies factory design and retooling if not engineers?

And if we cover everyone with a national health insurance program, the medical infrastructure will immediately need more nurses and primary care doctors. We already have plenty of specialists of most kinds; the only kind we need more of are in Ob-Gyn, pediatrics, geriatrics, rheumatology, and infectious disease. We'll also need more epidemiologists to study what works in medicine, and more molecular biologists and others to conduct medical research. We won't get those if we keep dumping huge medical school and graduate school expenses on students — we'll only get more surplus specialists, because they're the only ones who can charge enough to repay those outrageous loans.

We need more of anything related to R&D — and we can't rely on the private sector to produce that, because Wall Street punishes firms that invest heavily in research and development. R&D ties up money that stock analysts, the nitwits, think would be better spent paying quarterly dividends; they're wrong about that, insofar as the economy is concerned, just like they've been wrong about so much lately. So: we have to start considering our colleges and universities, including our nursing and medical schools, as part of the national economic defense infrastructure and begin investing more heavily in them accordingly.

It's in our short-term and long-term interest to do so, to ensure our economic security and prosperity now and in the future. There's far more return on investing in this manner than on spending money for any fighter jets, subs, or battleships you can name. And yes, of course we need to rebuild the physical infrastructure as well — but without those scientists and engineers, who's going to figure out a better way of repairing that physical infrastructure, so that it breaks down less often and costs less to maintain? Foreign engineers, perhaps?? And what's that going to do to our economy and already lopsided trade balance??? Not to mention our international standing in the socio-political-economic arena.

We should also triple or quadruple the budget for the National Science Foundation, because what it gets now is a drop in the bucket compared to that bloated defense budget. We need the NSF to fund more proposals and more kinds of research. The NSF also needs to begin soliciting some kinds of research proposals, issuing RFPs; after all, who else sees the kind of great work that nobody follows up on simply because there isn't enough research money? The reasoning for this budget expansion is described in detail in Kim Stanley Robinson's fascinating environmental trilogy, Forty Signs of Rain, Fifty Degrees Below, and Sixty Days And Counting, so I won't elaborate on it here (you should read those books anyway: not just highly entertaining, but very thought provoking as well). Suffice it to say that NSF seed money jump-starts lots of useful directions in basic research, and that's budget money that's always well spent. We just need to spread more of it around, and fast.

Very little of this funding for education and R&D will help most currently unemployed adults, however, unless they can spare the time and money to return to school under those scholarships in the key disciplines — because either they have enough in the bank to live on while in school, or else their spouses will be earning the money meanwhile and paying the bills. That's not possible for many of them. And if those unemployed adults are over 40 and have never been to college, this REALLY won't be the program that addresses any of their problems. That particular set of solutions will have to come from Bill Richardson's department and Obama's council of economic advisers.

However, Tom Friedman at the New York Times has a good idea: waive income taxes for teachers. Teachers make little enough money as it is, and we need more good ones. I'll let Friedman make the rest of that argument, but lifting the tax burden on teachers would certainly incentivize more mid-career unemployed to think about teaching what they know; and that couldn't hurt.

So why are we still talking about bailing out financial services firms and Detroit, when there's nothing either of those industries will do to reform themselves sufficiently to address the unemployed workers' problems, create new jobs, and thereby restart the economy? And perhaps there's nothing they can do, other than possibly forestall more layoffs for a while. So why favor them at the expense of the kinds of workers we know we need more of, now and in the future?

Besides, there's the fairness issue. Those financial services idiots helped to cause part of this recession (that $10 trillion added to the national debt by the Shrub administration sure explains much of the rest). They should be left on the limb they nearly sawed off, and we should help others instead. I don't really care about most of those unemployed in financial services, because so many of them made out like bandits that they really ought to have saved some of that cash (and if they didn't, it's their own damned fault). Wall Street can go hang.

But aside from the incompetent executives and planners, most of those who work for Detroit are Main Street folks, (formerly) middle and working class. Their kids aren't going to have the same kinds of jobs their folks did — and we need those young people to become more than factory or service or retail workers now. Their unemployed parents, that's a harder issue, one that requires faster results than a brand-new college education can produce.

But one thing is certain: superpowers that become service economies don't stay superpowers for very long. We need to get back to the things we do best, and the brightest of those is innovation. Can't do that without scientists, IT and engineers.

So what are we waiting for, senators and congressmen? Get busy!! This agenda is a no-brainer — so it should be right up your alley.

2008-03-18T16:22:00.008-05:00

On the democratization (or not) of the mass media
posted 3-18-2008 5:25 pm

An item posted yesterday on CNet News at News.com was brought to my attention by a friend:

Were we wrong about tech and the democratization of media?
By Charles Cooper

Cooper's blog commentary refers to a huge 2008 report by the Project for Excellence in Journalism titled "The State of the News Media 2008: An Annual Report on American Journalism," which is so big — more than 180,000 words long — that it can be found on its own separate Web site rather than on the PEJ site.

[Note: other, shorter bits referencing specific parts of the longish PEJ report will be posted in the near future to my other blog, PoliticalEye's Snark Attack]

Now, it'll take me a while to dig down into the report, give it a thorough going over, and read the more interesting charts and tables ... but a few things do immediately occur to me.

First, to which part of the media does Cooper refer? There's the overall media, including the entertainment end of print, broadcast, and film, plus the entire Internet, and then there's a much smaller subset of that universe known as the news media, in its print, broadcast, and online iterations. What part of that did he expect would be democratized by improvements in or the spread of technology (that tech presumably including the Internet)?

Second, what does Cooper mean by the democratization of the media, and again, to which part of the media does that refer?

If the expectation was that tech would somehow allow the average person to produce media product of any kind and get it before an audience on equal terms with, say, Rupert Murdoch or Viacom or Conrad Black, well then, the answer is absolutely not. The only part of the media in which ordinary citizens can even begin to put content before an audience on a close to equal footing with any other content producer, professional or amateur, is on the Internet. Print outlets, broadcast, and film are still largely dominated by big commercial producers, for a reason: it takes money and resources to get seen, heard, or read because you not only have to produce your message, you have to have a distribution method that is readily accessible and fairly cheap. The only part of the mass media that even begins to meet those two criteria is the Internet, and even that requires some resources.

If Cooper (or any of his techie readers) expected that advances in communications technology would open up print publishing, broadcast outlets, or the film industry to the everyday citizen, they were smoking something illegal. If, on the other hand, they thought that everyday people would find it easier to create and share content on the Internet (which, after all, wasn't created for them but by and for particle physicists who wanted to share information but then got co-opted by others), then that part has already happened. Content created and shared by everyday people represents a HUGE portion of Internet traffic but remains a tiny portion of all non-Internet media. For some sound reasons.

Second, just because you have tech doesn't mean you have 1) skill, 2) content that anyone finds interesting, or 3) content that is credible or reliable in terms of its truthfulness and frequency.

Let's consider film for a moment. Improved technology and dropping prices now allow an average person — even one who can't write — to make a video. Popular software allows that person to edit that video, and access to the Internet allows the video to be posted and widely distributed to anyone who wants to see it — as long as the creator of that video doesn't mind distributing it for free. If you want to make money from a video film, then you still pretty much have to market and distribute it the same way DVDs or theater films are marketed today, which takes money and willing connections.

But so much of what's on the Internet is free that you have to really lobby people to pay for content online and restrict access to it; you're more likely to be successful at getting people to pay for it if the only way they can get it is on DVD, in a theater, or by online download restricted to a paying basis. You're not likely to make any money at it if any form of the work is available for free, because sooner or later (and probably much sooner than later) that free version will make it to the Internet, and then all bets are off.

Then again, not everything presented on the Internet is worth paying for — which brings me to my second point. A lot of what's out there on the Internet is crap. Absolute and total garbage that nobody wants to pay for (and probably shouldn't), or intended for a very small audience, such as family and friends. Most people don't want to see your home movies from your last vacation unless they're technically superior and have interesting content that would appeal to a much broader audience than your in-laws or Grandma Sadie. I, for one, don't want to spend my time looking at baby pictures posted online by complete strangers — that's meant for a comparatively tiny audience, and a tiny audience is what it generally gets.

There is, however, a lot of content on the Internet that its creators think IS meant for a large audience — yet its actual audience is limited by the fact that it IS crap, i.e., esoteric or useless content, not credible or unreliable in terms of its truth, and/or poorly done, and/or in poor taste. Look at YouTube: yes, there's some interesting stuff that gets posted there every once in a while, a bit of it even brilliant — but 99 percent of it, perhaps more, is stuff that nobody should waste time on, and almost nobody does.

If by the democratization of the media you mean that nearly everyone has access and the content presented represents the broad range of citizens, then YouTube has to a significant degree accomplished that — but it also means that YouTube is representative precisely because so much of what's on it is utterly mediocre crap. Only a minority of citizens who put content on YouTube or similar distribution sites produce anything that's worth noting, and even less of that represents true art — but only a minority of people have EVER produced much that is worth noting and remembering, let alone anything that could be called art. Do we really need to argue the merits of clips that show Stupid People Tricks or the latest teenage take on 'Jackass' videos? And we haven’t even touched on the amount of reasoned, well structured argumentation presented as opposed to witless, pointless blather or fact-devoid ranting.

The mass of society produces mediocrity, period. But there is more opportunity to be creative with online media. There are more people today, including artists, who have access to newer video tech and to the Internet, therefore there are more voices/creators than before, and their work is more accessible than it would have been before, and there is greater potential that an artist whose work wouldn't have been seen before might now be seen (again, as long as those creators are willing to distribute their creations for free; if they actually want to make money at it, that is, as it was before, a much tougher proposition).

That last point is even truer of the news media, which is itself a minority of the mass media. Writing is a disciplined skill: just because you have a word processing program with spell check doesn't mean you can write, yet most people are under the delusion that they can. Being able to write in the sense of being more or less able to structure a sentence is one thing; being able to write as in having talent and being able to put together words effectively and persuasively is another. The two levels of ability should not be confused, but they frequently are in the minds of amateur content producers, wanna-be scriptwriters, or would-be novelists. Not every poetry slam produces genuine poetry, as opposed to rhyming doggerel.

Besides, even if you can put together sentences adequately, that doesn't mean you've produced anything of inherent worth. Further, reporting is a much harder skill to acquire than just the ability to write well enough to compose a letter or a lucid memo, and really good reporting is even harder than that. So much for citizen journalism. And much of what citizens create and distribute on the Internet these days doesn't even pretend to be journalism.

It turns out that people still want some semblance of truth and reliability from their news — and, finding it difficult to ascertain the veracity or reliability of unknown producers, they turn EVEN ONLINE to established media outlets because that professional product is still generally more reliable than its amateur competitors. We've learned over the last decade, sometimes the hard way, that you can't believe much of what you see on the Internet. In fact, you can believe a lot less of what you see on the Internet than what you see or hear in the professional news media, be it mainstream or alternative news media. That explains why online readers still rely heavily on 'establishment' media online for news content.

Besides, running a news gathering organization is still an expensive proposition that requires resources; the Internet didn't make that end of the news business any cheaper. Reporters still have to do research, still have to go out into the field, do interviews, report stories. And the more news outlets rely on wire service news or news gathered by someone other than their own reporters, the fewer real voices or sources there are for news. Doesn't matter that those voices/sources get published through more outlets if the origin of the news content is shrinking — and it is shrinking, from what I can tell of my profession just on street level, given the cutbacks and consolidations that are rampant and have been since the dot-com bust a decade ago.

I'll double-check that assertion of mine re: a smaller number of news gatherers with the PEJ study, but my professional perception is that publishers are cutting back on their reporting staffs and consolidating their news gathering among their owned news outlets in the name of 'efficiency.' What that really means to the public, however, is fewer voices among the news media, not more. It means that the real marketplace of ideas has shrunk, never mind that it gets replicated and distributed in more ways and more widely than it used to. It also means that fewer entities control the ownership and distribution of news, and that's bad.

Moreover, if anyone's making real money from online news reporting and distribution, they haven't yet demonstrated how that's happening. Most online news outlets are still parallels of or attached to their print or broadcast iterations — and it is the print and/or broadcast iterations that are making most of the money for those news outlets. Only in a few rare cases have efforts at getting paying subscribers for online news been successful, and even fewer the cases where it's online-only news, without a print or broadcast counterpart. For the most part, news outlets still aren't making any real money from publishing news online, whereas gathering the news still costs as much as it ever has. Reporters and editors need salaries, benefits, paid vacations; that hasn't changed and won't change in the near future. Who will report the news for free? Only amateurs, and not very good ones at that. If you want reliable news, you have to pay for it somehow.

Are the younger generations aware of that, and are they willing to pay for accurate, reliable news? They don't read newspapers or watch the evening news, for the most part, nor do they recognize a need to do so. Do they think they can get accurate news for free? Who do they think will make this possible??? In such an era, publicly funded 'not-for-profit' news organizations such as NPR and PBS become ever more important counterpoints to 'corporate' news media, whose owners are more concerned with quarterly earnings than coverage, and online news outlets of dubious quality and reliability. In that context, is the question of the 'democratization of the media' one that has any real value? Isn’t the more important question one about the continuing breadth, depth, and accuracy of the news?

Good journalism has nearly always been an 'elite' enterprise, in that it requires more than just basic literacy. Yes, the odd citizen reporter gets a truthful, reliable scoop now and then, but for the most part, it's professional journalists who get the job done. Consider: what we today think of as responsible news reporting, i.e., reporting that tries to be accurate, timely, and objective, may be a phenomenon of only the last century, perhaps even more recent than that.

The news media don't always meet the high standards to which we generally aspire in the free world, but at least we have high standards — yet it isn't a given historically that those high standards will continue to be held in high esteem by this society as a desirable value, or that the government of a given era will allow news gatherers to meet that standard. If you want free, relatively objective, accurate reporting as a society, you have to fight every so often for the right to have it and fight to maintain it. Give up the fight or decide that having such news isn't important to you, and you lose the ability to get such news. Which means you lose the ability for effective self-governance, a requirement of genuine democracy.

One wonders if, in their desire to 'democratize' the media, the techies have grasped that tidbit yet.

I'll be spending some time over the next few weeks going through that enormous PEJ report; we'll see what's in it that might flesh out this discussion, which means I'll have more on it in the future. Meanwhile, here’s a slightly different question to think about: is ‘democratization of the media’ as a whole achievable — or, for that matter, worth having?

2008-02-28T19:22:00.004-06:00

Barack, Hillary, supermajorities, and keeping up with the primaries
posted 2-21-2008
amended 2-28-2008

My, but things move quickly in primary politics these days; blame it on SuperTuesday. Unless Hillary pulls off a miracle in Texas and Ohio (I'm not betting on that), she likely won't be a significant factor anymore, even with that many delegates. Not even the most faithful of superdelegates wants to be associated with a perceived loser. So it may be moot for her by next week. We'll see.

There are those who say that Sen. Barack Obama is at least not promising much of anything, compared to other candidates, and therefore he’s somehow more realistic. It may also mean he has a dearth of ideas other than some vague notion of change. But these same partisans point out that he’s had less experience and less clout than Sen. Hillary Clinton and imply that he must be somehow more clever than she for him to be so much more ‘realistic’ in not making promises. Nonsense.

Obama’s isn't the kind of 'realism' that inspires anyone, which is why he's on the 'change' campaign instead. In fact, that 'realism' they cite is probably the most Beltway thing about him. The fact that he's not promising anything isn't good: it means he's not even going to try to attack some problems, health care being one of them — at a time when he might actually be able to make some progress and easily get the public on his side on those issues.

There are more people than ever uninsured — more than 47 million, at last count, which was more than a year ago — and more of them are 'middle class', whatever that means these days, than ever before, which provides us with a critical mass of Americans who want drastic change on health coverage and gives the Congress a window of opportunity that they may not have again for another 10-15 years. And I don't think we can afford to wait that long, for many economic reasons. This is NOT a situation that will improve with inattention. Or marginal, token efforts, like 'suggestions' that more people buy their own coverage. (Gimme a break!)

Also, I wouldn't underrate his clout. He has plenty; but it may as well be nonexistent if he won't use it. Obama and his consultant David Axelrod really ought to know that much: they're both Chicagoans, but they act like they've forgotten what they learned here.

So no, he's not actually being smarter than Hillary, he's just trying not to burn any bridges with certain industries this early — and he doesn't have to get specific while he's the front runner. It's not like the press is forcing him to. I don't think McCain will make great enough inroads into independent swing voters to force him to, either.

I decided a long time ago that I'd be fine with whichever one of them, Clinton or Obama, won the nomination; but I'm not fine about either of them abandoning any specific issues, and certainly not about health care being one of them. They need to be poked and prodded about that.

Partisans on all sides seem to rabidly polarized this year. Those with strongly held views don’t let little things like skepticism or facts that are inconvenient for their candidates to discuss get in the way of sticking to their guns. Indeed, they’re not about to be persuaded by even the most well-documented facts. That leaves those still sitting on the fence. As a journalist, my job is to inform, yes, but also to try to persuade those still not-quite-decided swing voters about what they should be demanding from all of the candidates, regardless of who wins the primaries, and persuading those voters not to let up the pressure after the inauguration.

That's when the real work begins, and the honeymoon will only last so long — which is why you have to come in with guns blazing and put out your most audacious, ambitious proposals up front during that first month or two and be prepared to ram them down Congress's throat with a lot of sugar, friendly backslapping, and inspirational (yet detailed) speechmaking: because that's when you're most likely to get it through. If Obama were taking his JFK lessons seriously, he'd already know that. The other three years and 10 months are all downhill after that, unless you've done the work and laid the foundations and the inspiration up front: then you can stretch it out for several months, until your first crisis, anyway (longer than that depends on how well you handle the crisis; but that's getting too far ahead, for now). As ever, my job is to provoke reasoned thought, a thankless task if ever there was one ... but somebody has to do it, eh?

So: since I’m busily provoking thought, here’s another one: regardless of which Democrat might yet win the race to the White House in November, that person will be hamstrung unless the voters give him or her a supermajority in Congress — that is, enough to win over a veto. In fact, that may be as important as the presidency itself. LBJ knew that yet even he had to twist arms to get some of his and JFK’s agenda through.

For those of you who haven't been paying attention: the Dems have a very thin margin, not a supermajority (66 votes in the Senate, 66 percent in the House), which is what you need to overcome a veto — and Shrub has been handing out vetoes like candy on anything that reasonable non-rich people might actually want or need. Without a supermajority, the Democrats need the aid of the very few moderate Republicans, who aren't going to be helpful during an election year: they can't afford to alienate their own party until after November, and even then, House members have to be careful as they run again in two years.

Neither Clinton nor Obama will be able to do much of anything, let alone get health coverage for all, unless there's a supermajority. That should disturb anyone who wants real change greatly. The senators both should be campaigning for other Democrats in the states as well as for themselves.

As for audacious proposals, a new president NEEDS to make the most audacious ones s/he can up front, because one of two things will happen as a result: 1) if there's too thin a margin and no supermajority even with a few moderate Republicans, there will be horse-trading and compromises that will eat away at the proposal bit by bit until it's either neutered or small enough/uncontroversial enough/cheap enough to pass both houses; or 2) you'll have a party leader or ranking member among the Dems who can twist a lot of arms firmly like LBJ did because s/he knows where the bodies are buried, and therefore little to no compromise will be needed — and nearly all of the ambitious version will actually be passed (YES!). Nice.

On the other hand, if you start by watering down your own proposal even before it gets to Congress, it won't be worth shit by the time they're done with it. You have to start by asking for A WHOLE LOT MORE than you think you'll get, so that you can afford to give things away (this is not the preferred strategy, but the fallback position — the preferred strategy is to know where the bodies are buried; in short, to snoop around and save your chips for the big deals like LBJ did).

For an excellent example of what Johnson was able to accomplish that way (but which, unfortunately, Nixon undid), see Krugman's article this week about poverty, entitled Poverty Is Poison.

This is an abject lesson on how good programs that deliver the kind of change voters seem to want right now can be undone when the opposition party takes charge and guts those same programs.

2008-02-08T06:38:00.011-06:00

Getting the health care discussion wrong
posted 2-8-2008 10:14 a.m.

Have you noticed that ever since the media — mainstream and new media alike — began marginalizing Dennis Kucinich during the presidential primary campaign, the conversation about health care reform began drifting away from any real reform?

What was a public dialog about national health insurance and universal coverage suddenly began to slide into one about whose plan would cover more people. That was a real change in conversation, and it amounts to an unchallenged bait and switch.

Now, nobody seems to have noticed that the discussion is no longer about universal coverage — because, of course, universal literally means everyone would be covered. And neither Sen. Clinton’s proposal, nor the less ambitious (read: superficial) plans proffered by Sen. Obama and Sen. McCain, let alone Gov. Huckabee, was ever intended to cover everyone. And though much has been made of Tom Daschle's book on health reform, there really isn't anything in there that will truly cover everyone, either. If voters think that any of these proposals would cover everyone, or almost everyone, they’re sadly mistaken. Remarkably, the press hasn’t pointed this out yet, probably because it didn't notice, either.

Time to rectify that. The reason is pressing: there hasn’t been this much public interest in and pressure for health care reform since the Clinton Administration’s effort went awry some 15 years ago. I said then what I’ll repeat now: that it might take a critical mass of so-called middle class Americans losing their health coverage before the pressure is great enough to force a change — and then, Congress may suddenly wake up and, in its haste to respond to the pressure to do something, will cobble together whatever the members think they can get past the lobbyists, and it will all be done quickly and badly. Then we’ll be stuck with a poorly designed Rube Goldberg contraption, and it will be years before we can recognize just how bad it is and undertake to fix it once again.

Time is of the essence, because we may not quite have that critical mass of uninsured blue-collar and white-collar middle-class Americans just yet, but we’re rapidly nearing that point. Which means this is an opportunity that the eventual new president must not neglect: it might be our last chance for another decade or more to get real change.

It strikes me that there are a whole spate of misconceptions that severely hamper this discussion and that even the members of the MSM believe. Worse, the MSM and the blogosphere both seem fixated once again on the ‘horse race’ aspect of the health care debate, i.e., on whose plan is more likely to win out and/or able to resist pressure from lobbyists and special interests and whose plan will cover more people, instead of discussing what actually works, what the reform should achieve, and what it should look like in order to meet those expectations.

So: we can start by naming the misconceptions and correcting them. Here’s what I’ve found so far:

• There is a basic misunderstanding of what the proposed 'reform' plans actually represent and the underlying assumption behind each plan.

Make no mistake, all these plans still treat health care as a benefit, meaning a privilege, not as a right that all Americans have. Because these proposals don’t treat health care as a right, what they actually represent is maintaining the status quo with a few bells and whistles tacked on.

There are only three positions possible on health care: First, health care is a benefit, no matter how desirable, and therefore you only get as much as you can pay for — and if you can’t pay for it, you don’t get it and that’s appropriate. Second, health care is an unlimited right and you get as much as you want, including elective procedures, and we find some way as a nation to pay for it, like taxes. And third, health care is a limited right like, say, public education — the government provides a basic education through grade 12 to everyone, funded by taxes, and similarly covers a basic comprehensive health benefit package, but it won’t pay all your college expenses for your Ph.D. at MIT, and it won’t pay for a nose job just because you don’t like your schnozz.

Clearly, Americans don’t believe that health care is a privilege: they think everyone should be able to get at least emergency care regardless of ability to pay. On the other hand, voters might not be willing to pay what it takes to have the most generous benefit package possible, which is what treating health care as an absolute right would dictate, so the real argument is about health care as a limited right and where to draw the line. And the basic comprehensive benefit package should probably be like the one offered by the Federal Employees’ Health Benefit Program, which is similar to the one specified by law for federally qualified HMOs and more generous in some respects than what Medicare covers. But that's not what's being discussed.

Interestingly, the presidential candidates kept referencing the benefit package of FEHBP without taking the next logical step: just using FEHBP itself as the basis of national health insurance.

This is your answer, gentlepersons of the House and Senate: Fold all existing Medicare and Medicaid beneficiaries into FEHBP, eliminate the Medicare and Medicaid bureaucracies, then let in everybody else and channel payment of all premiums through FEHBP for maximum leverage. AND DON'T create a new, additional bureaucracy like Daschle wants just to make him happy and pretend that it'll do any good, because it won't. Perhaps just using FEHBP, since it's already there, makes too much sense for politicians and right-wing government-haters to grasp the concept.

More likely, they're afraid of admitting the total cost and using the T-word: taxes. Personal and corporate. Progressive rates, meaning a sliding scale for individuals. What you pay now from your paycheck to cover your own contribution to whatever health plan your employer offers, along with your employer's contribution, would simply go to FEHBP instead and be applied to your premium. Same with the portion of your Social Security taxes that goes into the Medicare trust fund: hand it over to FEHBP. Because that would be the logical way to channel payment.

FEHBP, in turn, would pay the local health plan of your choice that already contracts with FEHBP (and there are plenty of those in every state). That puts everyone in the nation in one big risk pool, equalizes premium rates, and gives FEHBP some real leverage to hold down premiums — which it won't have any other way. Sounds expensive — except that we all wouldn't be paying as much as we pay now for premiums in the private sector, so that's an offset. In fact, we'd probably pay less per person, on average, and there would be no cost shifting needed to cover the hidden costs of the uninsured. Because there wouldn't be any uninsured, except for illegal aliens. And portability of coverage is then truly real and automatic for everyone, regardless of employment status: in short, a non-issue.

Someone needs to crunch those numbers. National health insurance through FEHBP would probably cost a lot less per person than people assume (and you'll notice that when critics claim it'll be expensive, they never actually cite per person premium estimates so that people could actually make a legitimate comparison). My plan, folks, doable in a year's time: FEHBP sets the premium payments like it does now, and it covers everyone who's a citizen or legal resident. Phase in Medicaid and the unemployed immediately, Medicare beneficiaries in 6-12 months. Then everyone else. Moreover, once everyone's included, FEHBP has the clout to set premiums, limit increases, and set tough public health and performance goals for the health plans. It's the only real way to guarantee affordability without resorting to price controls; just a thought. And those sissies on the Hill don't want to try it, no more so than the former presidential candidates. Hmph. But I digress ...

• Neither the candidates nor the public give any impression that they understand the difference between universal coverage and universal access to care — and there IS a very big difference between the two.

What most Americans really want is universal, guaranteed access to health care services. To have that, you need two things: effective care has to be made available to people when they need it, where they need it, in a timely and compassionate manner, which means that all the resources have to be in place, and people have to be able to pay for it, which means they need insurance coverage. The first requirement is a delivery system issue, and the second is a financing system problem (and YES, this means you’re dealing with two systems — health care delivery and health financing — and the solutions for one system are different from the solutions for the other; you can't get around that).

If all you have is a financing solution (meaning you’ve somehow made sure that everyone has insurance coverage), you haven’t guaranteed anything. Just ask the farmer who has private coverage and has a tractor accident three hours away from the closest trauma center with no air transport to get him there quickly, or the rural retiree covered by Medicare who has a heart attack but no paramedics to stabilize her on site and no ambulance service to reach a trauma ER or hospital cardiac unit within that golden hour that ensures survival. These people are covered, but their coverage is meaningless if they can’t get the specific kind of care they need when and where they need it. And putting resources where they’re needed is a delivery system problem that won’t be solved through universal coverage. Universal coverage is just the first step, a necessary but insufficient condition.

• There is an almost deliberate misunderstanding, particularly on the part of conservatives and libertarians, about what universal coverage through a single-payor system really means — and it doesn’t mean socialized medicine.

First, let’s make absolutely clear just what socialized medicine really is: it means that the government owns the health care delivery system, the way it does in England or France, and sets global budgets for hospitals, clinics, and their staffs. NOBODY is talking about the U.S. federal government owning all the hospitals or paying salaries to doctors, nurses and other health care professionals. Hell, Congress doesn’t want the federal government to own the entire delivery system because then it would be responsible for fixing everything. No takers on that.

What a single-payor system really means is that there is only one financing mechanism — that is, only one overall insurance program, one health plan — with the same features/benefit package for everyone; all Americans are included in that plan; the risk is spread over the entire group; the same premium rate applies to everyone (making it equitable); and that premium is paid for by progressive taxes on both individuals and corporations (making it affordable). The delivery system stays the way it is, in the private sector. Which means that the U.S. version of a single-payor system would be our version, one that works for us, and different from any other system in any other country. It probably also means that private insurers would only be able to sell supplemental health insurance for benefits not covered by the national plan — for example, coverage for cosmetic procedures, long-term care, or in vitro fertilization.

Besides, the opponents of a single-payor universal coverage plan are wrong when they claim Americans wouldn’t want a single-payor plan and would never put up with it: Medicare is a single-payor health program, always has been, and Americans like Medicare just fine. All they’d change about Medicare, if they could, is to have lower out-of-pocket costs and more services covered (that is, a more generous benefit package with lower or no copays and no deductibles, because those deductibles can still bankrupt you, easily).

So: the next time you hear people saying that a single-payor system means socialized medicine, call them liars to their faces — because that’s what they are.

• There is an equally stubborn, willful misunderstanding and disregard of the dubious merits of tax credits, tax deductions, and programs such as Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) as means to get more health care costs covered and/or get more people covered by private insurance. In reality, NONE of these devices makes health insurance more affordable or accessible.

Tax credits are a hoax, a false promise devised by conservatives who secretly hope that few people ever get to use them, because tax credits favor the wealthy. As incentives, tax credits and deductibles don’t work for one ridiculously obvious reason that still escapes anyone with a comfortable income: if you don’t have the money up front to pay the outrageously high premiums for decent health care coverage, the tax credit or deduction is meaningless to you, because you’ll never be able to take advantage of it. BTW, this is equally true for every other purpose for which tax credits have ever been offered or suggested: they're strictly for those who can afford to spend out of pocket, up front, for the intended purpose. Failed idea #1.

A health plan with a good benefit package that covers preventive care as well as acute care isn’t cheap. Moreover, health insurance premiums are even higher if you have to buy them as a non-group enrollee because you’re either self-employed, unemployed, or your employer doesn’t offer health coverage. Nobody wants to buy so-called 'bare-bones' coverage plans — precisely because they don’t cover much — yet their premiums aren’t that much cheaper than premiums for plans with more comprehensive benefits. Efforts to introduce such stripped-down coverage plans during the mid-1980s generally met with failure because so few people were interested in them. So most of them were dropped. Some bare-bones plans are attempting to make a reappearance now and pitching their product as 'affordable' in the hopes that desperate people who don't understand health insurance will buy them.

Similarly, high-deductible plans are only attractive to people who either are affluent enough to pay for their routine care out of pocket or never intend to use their health insurance for anything other than true emergencies — but that’s an idiotic attitude to have. First, you can never predict when or whether you’re going to need non-emergency care that is still quite serious enough to cost plenty, in which case your emergency-only high-deductible plan isn’t worth the premiums you’ve paid. Even with emergencies covered, your high deductibles and copays for covered services can still break you financially if you don't have the cash to cover those costs. And high-deductible plans typically don't cover any extended or long-term care, maybe not even rehab services, so you'd better not need a lot of inpatient rehab or nursing home care after that car accident you didn't anticipate.

Second, we know from the last 50 years of medical practice that we’re better off treating medical conditions earlier rather than later, and even better off preventing them altogether — which means that routine preventive care is important. However, high deductibles and other out-of-pocket costs such as high copays have been shown to discourage people from getting medical care early, when it would be least expensive to prevent or treat the illness or injury. So, bare-bones and high-deductible/high cost-sharing plans are stupid idea #2, based strictly on hard financial and medical realities.

HSAs, on the other hand, are created only to pay for out-of-pocket costs such as deductibles and copays and are only useful to those who can afford to have part of their income diverted to such accounts. If you have that kind of money to spare in this economy, goody for you — but I'm guessing you aren't unemployed or underemployed, in that case. Like tax credits and deductibles, HSAs do nothing to make health care premiums more affordable, and they’re not helpful to families that can’t afford health insurance premiums in the first place. Worse, if all you have is an HSA, the amount that most uninsured people can divert into that account won’t begin to cover a serious episode of illness — it’s a drop in the bucket whereas acute care can be expensive, which is why you needed real health insurance to begin with. HSAs are a break for the affluent, not for the uninsured: another tax giveaway to the wealthy.

To the extent that employers offer HSAs, they usually make a trade-off by limiting either the dollar amount they spend on health insurance premiums or the total amount spent per employee for all health benefits combined, including dental and vision coverage, prescription drugs, and HSAs; this is sometimes known as a cafeteria-style plan, but your choices are more limited than they look. Thus, employees who can apportion that total dollar amount as they wish are lulled into the false impression that they’re getting a better deal than if their employer simply paid the entire health insurance premium. Fat chance. Make no mistake, employers may call that giving employees choices, but it’s really about dumping more health care costs back onto the employees. The polite term is 'cost shifting,' and the employees in this case are the ones being shifted against. The term 'greater cost sharing' is merely a euphemism for the same cost shifting. The actual phrase should be 'sticking it to the workers' because employers merely use HSAs as cost-cutting mechanisms — for themselves, not you. So: ridiculous idea #3 — again, based on economic reality for the non-wealthy.

Is the message clear yet?

• Finally, there is a very real misunderstanding even on the part of some health economists as to what really drives rising health care costs, and it isn’t what most people think.

This, however, is a longer conversation based on health services research by people like Kenneth Thorpe, and very different from the financing discussion here. I’ll address this topic separately in the future.

2008-02-04T18:10:00.001-06:00

Things I noticed over a long weekend …
posted 2-4-2008 8:14 p.m.
amended 2-7-2008 5:55 p.m.

… while down with a cold and ignoring the Super Bowl:

George W. Bush is still stubbornly hallucinating about what’s going on in the world.

The country is finally restless with the current regime (at last! How long did they have to wait?), that's clear enough. How many ways can you take a 71 percent disapproval rating other than to admit that 71 percent of the populace hates you? Thus the sullen monotone delivery of the State of the Union address. And yet, beneath that depressed and depressing delivery was still the old, blindly stubborn pugnaciousness that is the flip side of the thin, shallow nice-guy routine that got W. Bush close enough to a win the second time around to steal it (the first time, he had to rely on The Supremes to steal it for him and on Gore's sense of honor not to pursue the matter further; what a waste *that* was).

Read the text of last Monday's State of the Union address, or even listen carefully to the words, and you hear that determined, knee-jerk rewriting of history in light of his own fantasy that is Shrub's trademark. He thinks if he tells a lie often enough, most people will believe it. More to the point, if he lies to himself often enough that he believes it, he expects us to believe it, too. Some will, sure — but the evidence of his incompetence is simply too great, the economy too badgered and the needless deaths too many to allow that now.

Voters are just as capable of rewriting history to suit their fears and fantasies as politicians are.

I don't doubt voters are looking for hope a la 1960. But it ain't the '60s, folks, and it’s long after Watergate, too; and we already know what happened to the political folk heroes of the 1960s. They died, long before they could accomplish their goals. And they weren't saints, either: JFK, Bobby Kennedy, and Martin Luther King all had their enormous flaws. Their successors were lesser figures but got more done. The war on poverty, for example, was LBJ’s thing. Shortly after, Watergate reminded us of just how badly presidents can betray us when their personal vanity and desire for power is at stake. Yet we forgot that for the longest time, once Ronald Reagan gave us that swill about ‘morning in America’ and showed us that even a B-movie actor has better and more believable delivery of even the most transparently mendacious pap than any career politician could ever hope to have.

We’ve forgotten how out of touch Reagan was during his own campaigns, how many huge misstatements he made before he was finally elected and how his handlers had to rein him in during the campaign and keep him from ad libbing lest he go off the deep end again and anyone think he was going senile (we now know that he was, in fact, coming down with Alzheimer’s and probably long before he left office; remember the Bitburg fiasco, when Reagan insisted on visiting a German cemetery where Nazi SS officers were buried and he called the German military dead there 'victims'?). We've also forgotten how much Reagan rewrote history and took credit for things that had little to do with him (see my critique of Reagan on the occasion of his death). It’s not like the Republicans are eager for us to remember Reagan’s many errors and blunders, either.

Reagan was so persuasive in part because he believed what he was saying, even when what he believed was utter nonsense. Had there been no Reagan lulling our wise post-Watergate suspicions to sleep, nobody could have gotten us into a war like the current Iraq fiasco so soon after Watergate by lying to us about the evidence – we’d have lynched anyone who tried. We’d have surely demanded more clearly verifiable evidence than the crap Colin Powell presented (and how clever of Shrub’s aides to let Colin Powell present that lie to the world, knowing he had far more credibility than the know-nothing W. Bush). And having discovered that there were no weapons of mass destruction and no connection between Saddam Hussein and Islamic terrorists gunning for the U.S., we’d have clamored for impeachment.

After all, how much more, other than outright treason, do you need for impeachment when you have a case of a president getting us into a needless war on the basis of grossly and deliberately misrepresented data? Isn’t getting us into war under false pretenses SO much worse (and doesn’t it fit the definition of high crimes and misdemeanors so much better) than simply lying about getting sucked off by an intern in the Oval Office because you’re afraid of what your wife might do if she found out? Had Dubya’s War happened before Reagan, it would have landed much of his staff and perhaps part of his cabinet in jail and he himself would have been either forced to resign or impeached. That’s if Congress then had even allowed the war in the first place.

People still grant the Kennedy family an esteem and reverence that is out of proportion with what the political members of that family have actually accomplished but is more in line with respect for the family of ‘martyrs’ — and because of this reverence, people are also loath to carefully examine the individual members’ flaws, even as they hungrily grab the tabloids for the latest Kennedy family gossip. Thus, the family still has more popular influence than perhaps it should.

The one thing we can credit JFK with beyond setting an inspirational tone is setting a number of positive programs in motion, the two most notable being the Peace Corps and the space race. Still, a good start isn’t enough unless efforts are dutifully maintained. The Peace Corps has been chronically underfunded and underrated since 1970, and the space program was largely abandoned as an attempt to get human beings permanently into space by none other than Richard Nixon and was barely resuscitated after a 20-year hiatus. It’s still touch and go, a victim of presidential whims and budget cuts over the years, and now underfunded as well. And notice how Shrub wants to take credit for the space program now, too?

Anyone who doubts how tarnished the Kennedy legacy is needs to read Robert Dallek's recent JFK bio, An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, which has some new information in it; it's both revealing and humanizing, but it sure doesn't give us any reason to canonize JFK. The book also shows just how slow Bobby was to coming 'round to his older brother's more strategically tolerant point of view.

As for Ted Kennedy, he's had a much longer, dutiful, productive, and more unabashedly liberal political career than either of his two more famous brothers, but he really makes a much better senator, being unfit for the presidency. Yes, he has a long list of honorable accomplishments — but has everyone forgotten Chappaquiddick and how in a drunken stupor he left a young woman to drown after his car went off a bridge? It seemed like all anyone could talk about in the political blogs last week was the degree to which Ted did or didn't diss the Clintons by supporting Obama and why. What puzzles me is why this should be remotely important.

One would have thought Ted could relate more to Bill: after all, there are plenty of Kennedy men, Ted included, who couldn't manage to keep their pants zipped at the right moment. Ted has nephews who have bedded their kids' nannies, others who have beat rape charges by having more expensive lawyers than their accusers could ever afford. And it's not like Bill Clinton or any of the Kennedy men ever chose really intelligent, savvy, discreet women for their affairs (if they had, those affairs might still be private — or they might not have happened at all, smart women being capable of seeing the futility of an affair with a public figure).

All of which brings us back to the long-suffering Hillary Clinton and the virtually-anointed-once-he-spoke-at-the-Democratic-convention Obama, two senators who have a checkable voting record but who have never had direct experience in administration because they've never been governors. And here, the one edge Sen. Clinton has over Sen. Obama is that she knows what it took to get her husband's first administration off the ground and running: the process of selecting a cabinet and staffers, why judicial nominees are important, how to get White House aides talking to congressional staffers, and so on.

Don't think for a moment that she was so sequestered in the White House with things that first ladies are expected to do that she had no input over the dinner table or didn't see and read files and position papers with Bill late at night, didn't debate with him every bit as much as Rahm Emanuel did about how things should get done. Oh yes, I'd bet anything her input went much further and was far more detailed than anything Laura Bush has had to contend with. It had to be, given her involvement with the health reform effort. This is neither good nor bad as first ladies are concerned, just fact because of how much Bill and Hillary have always shared politically during his long career.

Political dynasties aren't all that beneficial, yet people are more than willing to grant them if they like the family. The Kennedys have had no less in Massachusetts than what Bill and Hillary are trying to achieve in the White House. But because the Bush dynasty was so disastrous for the nation and the economy and people are so tired of the abuses and stupidity of Dubya Bush in particular, they now find it easy to reject another dose of Clintons, erroneously equating the two families. Those who hate the Bushes and now prefer Obama want to tar the Clintons with the Bush brush. They're wrong to do so.

If you want to hate the Clintons, at least hate them for their own sins, which are truthfully nothing like those of either Bush presidency in kind or degree. There is no immediate default position, for example, of either Clinton being on the side of oil moguls or the rich the way there is with the Bushes. There is no comparable willingness to lay waste to the economy by driving up the national debt in the same spendthrift, willfully blind way that the Bushes did — the sole (and worst possible) way in which they imitated Ronald Reagan, the guy who did more damage to the national debt than the five presidents preceding him did as a group (they actually helped lower the debt by repaying debts left over from World War II, the war that Reagan managed not to fight in while he was busy making propaganda films; that must have been what inspired the young George W. Bush to fly in the Texas Air National Guard and go AWOL even from that when he might have been bleeding and dying in Vietnam instead).

To simply say that the Clintons and the Bushes are the same is to admit that you’ve stopped thinking and actually don’t care about thinking hard on what their differences might be and are content to make blind, sweeping generalizations instead. Which bodes ill for the elections and the next presidency. In fact, it's almost as idiotic as Barack Obama saying nice things about Reagan when he ought to be using this opportunity to discredit Reaganism altogether, along with all of its anti-poor, anti-populist, anti-progressive consequences (nice blooper there, Senator; got an encore? Will you be rehabilitating Nixon's role in Watergate next?).

What is worse is that if you keep on not thinking that way, you’ll probably get the idiot president you deserve — but you’ll also stick me and everyone else who does give a damn with the same idiot as well. Which is, in part, how we got Shrub the second time around, isn’t it?

Which also brings be back to what started me writing Op-Ed in the first place:

Of course it matters whether we vote and whom we vote for, be it a primary or a regular election.

People who are trying to rationalize their own unwillingness to go to the polls insist that one vote doesn’t count. But of course one vote matters. Multiply that thought by thousands who've thought exactly the same thing, and you come up with at the very least a margin of error, at the most a margin of victory. Yes it does matter which of these very human, flawed people we vote for, for more reasons that are immediately apparent. We may well want better candidates, but all we have are those who are running and have decided to endure what the race demands. Running for office takes courage, money, vanity, singlemindedness bordering on obsession, and a big enough ego to take a lot of rejection and still come out swinging. Politics isn’t for sissies or wallflowers, and the process doesn’t necessarily make you very likeable. We have to choose from what's available.

Dennis Kucinich had one issue very right — health care reform — and on the rest, he was sadly misinformed about much. He was there to bring that one idea to the table. To John Edwards (way not perfect either and also known to spin his own history, but not as obnoxious as some), that one issue was poverty. I thank these two for their contribution of ideas, but they're gone now and someone else has to push their discussions. And that won't be Obama or Clinton, sad to say. So it has to be us. Voters and media.

What really nauseates me is the amount of sheer vitriol I read in the online comments appended by readers to virtually any political article in the papers and magazines these days. Much of it spills over into the blogs. The amount of venom spewed by partisans of all stripes is just staggering — mostly because so little of it is well thought out or even pretends to have any thought or evidence behind it. This isn't about persuasion or provoking thought, it's about libel and slander, pure and simple. As if individual members of society thought they could, through this slander, punish the politicians whom they think have wronged or abandoned them (not likely).

And slander, besides persuading no one, doesn't make for informed consent, the only thing besides free, fair, unrigged elections that gives attempts at self-governance any meaning. The point being that free elections by themselves are meaningless if you know nothing about the candidates, or are so accustomed to authoritarian rule that you'd gladly hand over your governance to the next strong man out of sheer relief at not having to think for yourself until the next election. Free elections, when not backed up with informed consent and a certain amount of skepticism on the part of the voters, can produce very bad results indeed.

I'd let the reader comments and vitriolic blogs depress me more except for the fact that I know this is a self-selected group of People Who Choose To Respond, and I don't know how far their comments or their polarization can be taken as representative of the whole. I’d like to think the electorate as a whole is smarter than that. But we’ll see.

2007-12-19T19:11:00.000-06:00

Getting rid of Barbie for President
posted 12-19-2007 8:14 p.m.

In today’s Washington Post, political columnist Dana Milbank writes:

... even these private reflections of the candidate frequently centered on public policy: "Senator Clinton was one of the first people to realize that the air was toxic. . . . She wants a good education for everybody. . . . She helped set up the system to provide services to indigent clients." Even the candidate's mother, Dorothy Rodham, noted how "she's been very active with social justice causes."

Maybe, then, The Hillary They Know isn't so different from the Hillary everybody else knows: She's a public-policy savant whose idea of a good time is reading white papers into the wee hours. ...

Milbank goes on to remark that “It was only a couple of weeks ago, after all, that she described as ‘fun’ her now-abandoned plans to attack rival Barack Obama.” Guess he just couldn’t resist that ‘gotcha’ at the end of the graf.

I reread the column. It struck me that there was something a little too smug about it, something that just pissed me off. It happens to be one snapshot in a long series on the campaign trail, this one about how Hillary Clinton has to go to great lengths to remind people that she puts on her sneakers one foot at a time, just like we do. That she still has something in common with the rest of us, even though she’s a policy wonk who sits up nights reading stuff the rest of us would never want to, just because somebody has to and she’s really good at it.

The part that middle America — hell, practically all of so-called ‘normal’ (meaning non-wonkish) America — holds against her is that she actually likes reading that stuff and, worse, can make sense out of it and tell others about it, so that we can each in our turn make intelligent decisions about it as citizens. Not that we will: we leave that job to our elected officials, then we curse them and distrust them for actually being ambitious enough to want the job we don’t.

Those good folks in Iowa whom Sen. Clinton is trying to persuade get to unduly influence the rest of the nation, come January. The people who live there are real enough, but their place in the popular mindset isn’t — it’s part of some 19th-century fantasy of what it is to be American.

Every four years, pundits and image makers, politicians and political columnists pay due homage to that fantasy, as if any of it still applied to modern life. We see largely rural and small-town states like Iowa and New Hampshire as places where solid homegrown values still supposedly reside, as if they cold not possibly do so in cities. Never mind that there are gangs and meth labs and heroin runners out in the cornfields just as much as there are in the suburbs or the inner city, that people still drink, get divorced, and beat their kids in the sticks as much (or as rarely) as they do in the city, or that global warming affects us all. Rural Iowa is still supposed to be hallowed ground, the repository of all we hold dear, and the caucuses there some kind of harbinger for presidential primaries and elections. What crap.

Small towns and farmlands may have been the roots of the nation, but that isn’t where the nation’s soul lives anymore. It isn’t where most of the people live, for better or worse. And I find myself resenting that the 19th-century fantasy that Iowa and New Hampshire symbolize for us and the mindset of the voters there have so much influence, so early, on a political process that affects us all.

I’m a city dweller, born and bred — an urban woman with no nostalgia whatsoever for the American past, but with a whole lot of respect for the problems that face the nation and the world today. I look at the Iowa that Republican and Democratic candidates canvass, and I see a social and political landscape that has no place for women like me. Or Hillary.

Laura Bush is more the image these folks have of what’s appropriate for a woman in the White House. Rural and small-town America has a homier vision of what women are supposed to be: waitresses, secretaries, nurses, schoolteachers. Friendly. Always helpful, nothing threatening about them. None of them would be up at 4 a.m. reading position papers or draft legislation. It occurs to me that Laura Bush is the Barbie version of what a woman in the White House is supposed to be. And I hate that.

In political Barbieland, there is nothing that isn’t perky, reassuring, smiling, homogenized, non-threatening. It’s all frilly and acceptably female. Where are the outfits and accessories for Barbie the IT developer, Barbie the geologist, Barbie the neurobiologist or molecular geneticist, Barbie the aeronautical engineer? Barbie the policy wonk?? Nonexistent.

But there are plenty of real women out there who are nerds, geeks, wonks, who use their brains for a living. Who stay late at work developing projects, monitoring experiments, analyzing legal decisions, writing research reports, reviewing patient records, going to faculty meetings, brainstorming into the wee hours. Women who have as much laundry waiting for them as do the farmers’ wives and the soccer moms, but who have given up part of their social lives and their ‘free’ time to do work that they’re good at, work they love. Who are still underpaid and undervalued by a society that can’t get long without them, who look at that fantasy that hovers over Iowa like stench from an industrial pig farm and find themselves marginalized by it.

There are thousands of such women, millions of them out there. Nerds, geeks, wonks. They love what they do, but sometimes they feel penalized for it, marked as odd. I’m one of them, and we’re all marked, but most of us wear that mark with pride. Sure, there have been nights when I literally dreamt about statistics on the uninsured and days when I thought that if I had to read one more position paper about Medicare or Social Security, I’d scream. I’m an analytical reporter and a policy analyst, so it comes with the turf, but knowing that doesn’t always make doing the work any easier.

But then there are those times when I’ve gone through reams of documents until I thought I’d drown in them, when suddenly the last piece snaps into place, an analysis clicks into focus, and I realize I’ve figured out something nobody else has yet — and I am so joyous I could dance. For about two seconds, until I’m stopped cold, wondering what I can actually do with what I’ve just figured out. I call those my Hillary moments. I only have to write about what I’ve figured out. She has to do all the same reading and then actually do something with the result. And she likes it; imagine that.

That’s the dirty little secret that all those nerdy, geeky, wonky women and I share: we’ve all had those delirious eureka moments, and they almost make all the drudgery that comes before and after worthwhile. In fact, they’re one of the reasons we love what we do: those moments are our reward. I look at those women, and then I look at Hillary, and I recognize that she is one of us. Somebody like me. And I haven’t ever seen anyone like me anywhere near the White House. Except for the years Sen. Clinton was First Lady. I hated it when political advisers dumbed down her image to make her ‘palatable’ to the rest of the electorate.

Now, that out-of-date fantasy image of America is making her do it again on the campaign trail, and I find myself growling under my breath.

So when I read something like Dana Milbank’s column today, it makes me want to take that pseudo-Midwestern, Barbie image of political women and smash it. Brutalize it. Torch it and throw the ashes into a tar pit, then nuke that with an industrial laser, until the particles pass through the exosphere into the solar wind and are carried out past the far ends of the solar system, never to return. I want it dead and buried, along with that useless 19th-century fantasy. And I want a clueless, self-indulgent, complacent America to stop daydreaming, grow up, and start dealing with its problems today, not tomorrow or 200 years from now.

Then I remember that all those nerdy, geeky, wonky women and I all have the vote. And I think there just might be a chance yet to trounce on that Iowa caucus and New Hampshire primary after all.

Do I think that Hillary Clinton is the perfect candidate? Nope, I have serious doubts - she’s deeply flawed; but then, so are the rest of us. Is she political? You bet, but that’s part of the job. Is she ruthless? Probably; but show me a scientist who has to dump years’ worth of her work and start over because an experiment was compromised who isn’t ruthless about it. Aggressive? Sure — and so is every successful CEO on the planet. Ambitious? Absolutely — same as any woman who’s ever become an astronaut or an astrophysicist, a submarine captain or a film director. You don’t get to do the good stuff by being shy and retiring.

Sen. Clinton may not be what we expect as president. She may even fail spectacularly, but I want her to have the same chance at failing (or succeeding) at that job as any man running for it. And after 200-some years, instead of one more generation of silky voiced, plastic-smiled, hand-shaking, baby-kissing men, I’d like to see someone in the Oval Office who looks like me — not sanitized political Barbie, but me.

Let’s see if all those other nerdy, geeky, wonky women want to do something about that.

2007-10-29T02:13:00.000-05:00

On confusing the marketing with the message:
Pushing for better campaign coverage

revised and reposted 10-29-2007 2:42 p.m.
original post 10-21-2007 1:15 p.m.

Maureen Dowd's columns usually make me raise an eyebrow or two, smile, or even laugh out loud. They often provoke me to think harder about a given topic, which is good. This, despite the fact that I don't always agree with her. My eyebrows went up for a different reason, however, when I read this morning's New York Times column (Sunday, October 21, 2007) entitled Cougars, Archers, Snipers.

I'm glad to know — but not really surprised — that Hillary Clinton's campaign is supposedly making use of a pollster who has broken down the electorate into categories and written a book about those categories. Pollsters, marketers and sociologists have been doing that for years. The public doesn't automatically reject those labels, either, nor does the press (remember when you first heard or read the term 'yuppies'? It sounded strange — but we all know how to recognize one now, don't we? One only hopes that the obnoxious term 'cougars' doesn't stick).

Human beings have been categorizing other human beings for nearly as long as there have been human beings, if only into the simple categories of Us and Them — Them, of course, usually being people who are different from Us in some way and, therefore, to be feared, shunned, and possibly warred against on occasion. That rulers or politicians would make use of such information to stay in office (or to keep the masses from rioting for whatever reason) is unsurprising; they've been making promises to unhappy masses for as long as there have been leaders hoping to survive their terms of office. No doubt somebody promised someone something appealing like food or an animal skin or a better hunt just to keep his head when our ancestors lived in caves. Thus was born the predecessor of the campaign promise. It was a kind of survival tool.

Still, if Hillary's — or anyone else's — pollster is creating new categories for analyzing potential voters, it's useful for those voters to know about it. Fair enough. And Dowd has never really liked Hillary, and she's entitled to that opinion. That's fair, too.

But what strikes me this morning is the somewhat toxic assumption on Dowd's part that if any of the policies Hillary proposes resonates with any one of these subcategories of people, this is automatically bad, Machiavellian, not to be trusted. Haven't we had enough of presidents who really aren't responsive to what the majority of Americans — or subsets thereof who aren't among the top economic stratum or power elite — actually want from their government? Like the dork currently in office, who talks a not particularly persuasive line of guff but got let off easy by nearly everyone until invading Iraq turned out to be the disaster that those of us in the vocal minority — like Russ Feingold — warned it would be?

To point this out (or to point out that Sen. Clinton may not be perfect but would be a much better alternative than the guy currently in the White House) doesn't automatically render me a Clinton supporter or apologist — just someone who recognizes a fact when she sees one. And the fact is that Dowd treats Sen. Clinton with nearly as much contempt (yet with less sharp analysis) as she does Dubya Bush.

Is it possible that Hillary is polling first and creating policies to appeal to microsegments of society second? Sure. But we and Ms. Dowd should look at the facts first before jumping to that conclusion. Some of the issues that Hillary talks about now and proposes policies for are issues she's been interested in for 30 years or more: child welfare, families and family law, health care. That's documented. So it's also possible, and entirely more likely, that she's using poll results to figure out just how welcome some of these proposals she's been pondering for years will be with certain segments of the populace.

It's not clear to me that there's anything wrong with that as long as the policies and ideas came first — and it looks like in her case, they did on at least the aforementioned subjects. That her ideas might have evolved over that long a time is actually to be hoped for: it might indicate that she refined her views periodically in response to new information, learned more about what works out in the field as opposed to what looks good on paper to politicians and bureaucrats, and/or learned more about what it takes to get legislation passed and sensible regulations written that accurately reflect that legislation.

Did she and her husband bungle their health reform proposal during his first administration? You bet, but not for the reasons Dowd thinks — most certainly NOT because they were supposedly pandering to the health care industry, as Dowd accuses. I'm in a position to know: I was covering health care and health policy from a national perspective for the business press long before the Clintons ever made it to the White House and in much greater depth than nearly anyone at the Times, including Dowd, has before or since (the two possible exceptions were Milt Freudenheim and Robert Pear, and even then I'd been on my beat longer than Pear had been covering anything health policy related).

Any time Dowd has two or three uninterrupted hours to spare, I'll be happy to clue her in as to what the real deal was. In fact, I'd be happy to tell Hillary everything she doesn't know about health care reform — and there's still plenty — if she had presence of mind enough to ask me.

I could also tell Dowd why virtually all of the White House press corps did such an abominable, embarrassing job of covering health care reform last time. For one thing, they covered the horse race much more than the content, rarely discussing what should have been proposed instead or accurately analyzing the feasibility of what had been proposed — which they clearly didn't have the background to do anyway. But then, the White House press corps are dilettantes, most expert at covering the White House and its shenanigans and not at all expert in the actual subject matter of health care, health policy, or health care finance (all of which I'd by then already covered in detail during previous administrations). Reporters and columnists covering Congress aren't much better at it.

To have them covering health care reform was an error made by their editors and compounded by the reporters' and columnists' unfamiliarity with the subject matter and subsequent lousy performance. One can only wonder what on earth those editors were thinking in not reaching instead for reporters who were subject specialists. But I digress: my point is that I don't expect the Washington press corps to do any better this time around, given what I've seen so far. Dowd's work included.

One wishes Dowd had paid more attention to Judith Warner's blog item last week on the dearth of coverage on a policy speech of Hillary's. Surely, it would have provided Dowd with better meat for her knives and us with more helpful information:

An analysis of Clinton's policy proposals would give voters insight into what her administration might choose to accomplish, certainly more so than comments about her pollsters' market categories; yet practically nobody covered the speech or the material in it, or even remarked on it. If not for Warner's blog entry, I wouldn't have known a) about the speech even being given, and b) that nobody covered it, thus depriving me of important information. I'm thankful Warner wrote the item. But damn, Maureen, can't you and your other colleagues do a little bit more than dis Hillary's head counters? If you're going to slice and dice the senator, you could at least produce something that's a little more useful to the readers.

By taking on the Hillary marketers rather than detailing and dishing on Hillary's proposed policies during the week she made a major policy speech, Dowd took the easy, lazy way out. Try harder, babe: if nobody else is giving us that policy stuff, then you should be. If you don't want to be just another one of the press corps sheep, you ought to be looking long and digging deep for what everyone else is missing. It's work, yeah, but you might actually enjoy it.

Oh, and since Ms. Dowd has often complained about the lack of enough women on the op-ed pages, she ought to appreciate getting this response from an analytical reporter who just happens to be female.

2007-10-29T01:46:00.002-05:00

Public ventures: Getting around ComEd’s rate dilemma

revised and reposted 10-29-2007 2:03 a.m.
original post Monday, August 6, 2007, 8:45 p.m.

Part two of a two-part essay
Previously: a short history of utility monopoly

We have a seeming dilemma on electric rates in Illinois. The key word is ‘seeming,’ of course.

ComEd demands higher electric rates because the parent company it created to absorb its generating plants, Exelon Corp., is raising the price of electricity to it so it can make more money. ComEd claims this is absolutely necessary or it will go bankrupt. As if Exelon would really ever let its subsidiary go out of business (if it did, it wouldn’t have a public to which to sell the power it generates … unless it wanted to sell that power at premium rates to the rest of the country instead, right? Leaving Illinois energy users up a creek. Hmmmm. There’s a thought).

After much struggle between the state’s legislative Powers That Be, Mike Madigan and Emil Jones, a shove from Gov. Rod Blagojevich, and two cents from Mayor Daley and the Citizens Utility Board, there is a compromise of sorts. Madigan wanted a continued rate freeze and price rollback from the start of this year, when rates jumped. Jones wanted to allow ComEd a much higher rate increase, even if phased in over several years. CUB wanted even lower rates, being rightly leery of the mechanism by which Exelon was able to produce the ‘need’ for higher rates. What we have instead are rebates to rate payers for a limited period, along with phased-in rate increases – if the governor signs the bill. But none of this will keep electric rates from getting unbearably high in the future. It’s just a stalling technique.

Rate payers, also known as voters, are caught in the middle and will ultimately pay one way or the other. Worse, they’re not sure whom to believe. Yet everyone knows that utility rates never (well, almost never) go down once they’ve risen. Consumers feel used, suspicious, and resentful – and given ComEd’s history, well they should. But they also don’t see a way around eventually paying higher rates, other than pressuring politicians to prevent it. That only works for so long.

Maybe the answer is twofold: first, to once more have public utilities with their own ability to generate power and to remove the monopoly advantage from those that don’t – and by this, I mean truly public utilities, ventures owned by the voters and financed with municipal bonds in addition to rate revenues – and second, to ban lobbying by all public utilities and their parent companies, whether municipally owned, privately owned, or publicly traded (that won’t be enough to keep energy companies from unduly influencing government, but it’s a start; for more then that, we need campaign finance reform, and that’s another subject).

There are some existing municipal energy utilities, those owned by individual towns and cities. Mayor Daley himself threatened to dump ComEd and consider municipal power production several years ago, the last time there were multiple blackouts during a particularly hot summer, an embarrassing number of heat-related deaths as a result, and some really bad press about ComEd’s lousy record of maintaining its aging equipment and transmission system. It’s not like a public power production venture is a completely new idea.

In today’s economic climate, such new municipal or regional start-ups would likely be prohibitively expensive; yet upgrading existing ones is also expensive. Six of one, half a dozen of the other. Consumers would pay either way, but over the long run, they might pay considerably less with a public venture than with ComEd. Especially if they can defray some of their own usage costs by generating part of their own power. The Center for Neighborhood Technology and environmental organizations have been pushing the idea for years, but technology is finally becoming reasonably enough priced for consumers to be able to really consider it.

So perhaps it’s time to consider a statewide or regional energy cooperative model to compete with ComEd, one that would combine local ownership with shared funding and shared power generation among many communities within the state using newer high-tech methods, including wind farms, solar energy, cutting-edge pollution controls and ’clean’ coal plants.

Such a co-op could also encourage individual consumers to invest in their own active power generation tech and passive conservation mechanisms by granting energy credits that would cut the cost of any power those consumers did buy from the co-op grid. Consumers could also lower their own rates by selling any excess power their home systems created back to the co-op grid. Further, because taxes would have to help cover any costs for excess power the co-op had to buy on the open market, consumers and business users – who are also voters – would have a direct incentive to lower their energy use. Meanwhile, consumer watchdogs would continue to scrutinize the utility co-ops just as they do now. And voters and media will still have to put pressure on the Emil Joneses of the world to keep them from selling out to the remaining private energy companies in exchange for campaign contributions.

Would the new municipal or regional energy co-ops be able to generate all their own electricity? Not at first, and perhaps not for many years; but that doesn’t mean they couldn’t generate a significant amount of energy that would end up lowering overall costs to consumers, or that consumers couldn’t significantly lower their own energy use – and, thereby, overall local demand – by having significant incentives to produce some of their own energy and selling back their excess. Remember, sunlight and wind are free, so why should we pay ComEd and other energy companies higher rates for energy we can partially produce ourselves? Why let ComEd and its ilk corner the market on solar and wind power when those belong to everyone?

ComEd and other electric utilities do need competition, it’s true – but not from the likes of each other, because all of them are vulnerable to the same corporate machinations that have jacked up ComEd’s energy costs. The only people who benefit from Exelon’s shenanigans are Exelon shareholders, while the rest of us pay the costs, which will be even more outrageous in the future unless a truly publicly owned venture steps in to challenge the old electric utilities.

Perhaps it’s time to once again make a public investment for the public good, because the robber barons have gotten too greedy. Eliminating stockholder-owned energy giants may be neither feasible nor desirable, but they’ve gotten too big and bloated and are too beholden to Wall Street to be technologically innovative. They’re too focused on share price and quarterly dividends. Time for energy producers who don’t have to answer to that and can be more inventive.

Yes, I know what you’re thinking: this is what NASA used to be, an aggressively creative public trust, and see what it’s become now – inept, careless, cheap about quality, afraid of its own shadow; space exploration is better off in less bureaucratic, more flexible private hands. Maybe, in that instance; maybe not. The truth, however, is that neither the market, which always moves towards profits and eliminating the competition, nor government, which can get bloated or become victim to lobbyists, budget cuts, or enraged voters, does well by itself over the long term. Both corporations and governments can become hamstrung by bureaucracy and stodgy in the face of needed change; neither is immune. When it comes to critical public services, be they defense, basic scientific research, space exploration, or providing power, the market and the government need to keep each other honest. They need to keep challenging each other. Neither should dominate if the nation is to benefit, and neither government nor consumers should be captive to corporations where public services are concerned.

ComEd and the market are failing us on power generation. Time for some innovative public intervention.

2007-10-29T00:29:00.000-05:00

Getting conned by ComEd, or What’s a utility monopoly for?

revised and reposted 10-29-2007 12:27 a.m.
original post Friday, 8-3-2007, 3:50 p.m.

Part one of a two-part essayWhat happens at an auction?

Whether the material on offer is famous artwork, the remains of an estate, multiple lots of fine wines, or a farm that went belly up, the point of an auction is to obtain competing bids in order to get the highest possible price for the seller. The shared expectation is that only one party other than the seller can get the goods, or win, and anyone who can’t offer more money than the top bidder loses. Whatever is in high demand is never a bargain at auction. Auctions are about maximizing income for the seller by getting someone who wants or needs the goods badly enough to be willing to pay a higher price than anyone else. No one is surprised when that happens.

So why did anyone believe energy companies and politicians when they told us that deregulating public utilities and allowing energy auctions would lower electric rates?

For those who think energy auctions are a good idea, I have two words: Enron. California. When energy costs in California skyrocketed a few years ago at a time demand increased and rolling blackouts became the norm, electric users paid insanely high rates while energy companies and their shareholders saw hefty profits. Firms like Enron made energy auctions possible and encouraged the excessive profits that buying energy ‘on the market’ instead of producing all a utility needs internally helped to create. Enron helped energy companies make obscene amounts of money even as they created an artificial shortage that allowed them to charge such high prices for energy bought at ‘market’ rates. And this subverted the purpose of giving public utilities a local monopoly.

Power is literally what makes modern societies run. It is an indispensable service. We grant electric and gas utilities favored status through regulated local monopolies because power is something consumers and businesses and governments can’t do without.

The idea of a local utility monopoly is that a utility gets an exclusive, captive market that will buy the energy it produces and in exchange provides reasonable rates to users. This is possible because the utility, by having no local competition, doesn’t have to spend the money on marketing or advertising that it otherwise would if it were competing for customers and can spend it instead on maintaining and improving its energy production and service while making a steady, if regulated, profit. The utility gets stability and predictability of demand and income to a considerable degree, and rate payers get lower rates than they would if power companies could charge whatever the market was willing to bear. The economy keeps running.

To help fund major capital improvements, utility companies went to the capital markets from the very beginning. Those willing to invest in utilities expected a small but steady, stable profit in return. And, in a move that sends a rational mind reeling today, utilities developed rate structures that charged lower rates to bigger users and higher rates to consumers. They did it to promote electrical use, which might have made sense when few had electricity in their homes or factories, but it completely discouraged energy conservation. For decades, that’s the way things worked. Until two things happened: nuclear power’s fall from grace, and the go-go market mania of the 1980s.

Nuclear power was supposed to be the cheap, clean alternative to coal burning, but it eventually proved to be neither. Utility companies that had over-relied on nuclear power to produce electricity discovered during the 1970s and 1980s that the nuclear option was possibly more expensive than it was worth. Plants aged and deteriorated and maintaining them became increasingly expensive, there was (and still is) no really good way to dispose of large amounts of nuclear waste that remains radioactive for hundreds of years, and consumers became increasingly disenchanted with the dangers of nuclear power plants, particularly after the Three Mile Island and Chernobyl accidents.

If consumers and voters were unhappy, investors were even more so. There were several prominent failures of nuclear-power based utility companies, and the cost of repairing or replacing reactors kept rising. The cost of repair and replacement was supposed to be borne by shareholders, who were there to take on risk, not rate payers. That’s part of what the term public utility meant: the utility provided a public service and kept costs down while getting the risk of competition eliminated.

Of course, utilities like ComEd in time discovered that they needed to invest in marketing anyway, along with lobbying, if only to sell themselves better to rate payers and regulators who were angry about lousy customer service, power plant accidents, and higher utility rates. So the advertising and marketing costs never went away and by now are a significant part of utility companies’ budgets; and though consumer watchdogs expected investors, not customers, to bear marketing and lobbying costs, the stockholders balked. Then the oil crisis of the 1970s and the cost of pollution controls for coal-fired generating plants further added to utilities’ expenses. Still, utilities didn’t restructure their rates to encourage lower energy use, which might have been helpful in lowering demand and eliminating the need to buy excess power from others.

Meanwhile, the Reagan era ushered in a make-money-damn-the-consequences mentality on Wall Street. Sure, there had always been robber barons in business, but now there were corporate raiders like T. Boone Pickens and Carl Icahn, whose sole purpose in life seemed to be buying up and breaking up companies to maximize profits regardless of the costs to consumers, employees, or local economies. To them, a public utility is no different than any other corporation – in their view, it exists mainly to provide a profit to shareholders, never mind that it might provide a critical public service and thus maybe shouldn’t be treated like any other business.

Deregulation was another idea that reared its ugly head during the 1980s. Reagan himself encouraged it, believing strongly that anything connected to government was part of the problem, that regulation was and is always bad for business, and market forces are always a better alternative (he forgot, perhaps, if he ever knew, that pro-market economist Adam Smith himself said that a completely free, unregulated market is a dysfunctional one. Or that the natural tendency of a completely free market is to steadily eliminate competition and move first to oligopoly, then to monopoly, thus raising prices for all consumers). The notion of deregulation persisted as part of the Republican party line over four decades and into the new millennium, including in its wake such financial disasters as the savings and loan debacle and its horrendously expensive bailout during the ‘80s and the California electric power crisis of the last decade.

Still, the market maniacs seemed to have learned nothing even as Wall Street became further and further complicit in pushing companies to focus on improving short-term stock prices instead of long-term results or actual products and services. Not even the dot-com bust at the turn of the millennium or the recent brokerage firm scandals (wherein brokers touted the stocks of companies that were clients of those firm’s investment banking divisions, which is deceptive and illegal) seem to have given deregulation fans pause.

It’s in this environment that some public electric utilities decided to appease Wall Street and make more money for shareholders another way: they created corporate structures that would allow them to artificially inflate the price of providing electric service without increasing the cost of actually producing it and having two opportunities to make money on the same unit of energy instead of just one. This gets around any need for actual deregulation, as only the direct energy provider, the public utility service, is regulated while the corporate parent is not.

ComEd is a perfect example: it created a corporate parent or holding company above itself, Exelon Corp., which now owns its power plants. ComEd itself now does nothing but provide service to customers. It generates no power but pretends to buy power on the market; in reality, the vast majority of its power is supplied by Exelon Corp. and the very same power plants that supplied it before. Exelon, meanwhile, can charge ComEd whatever it thinks it can get away with for the power it produces, whereas before, ComEd got that same power at cost because it owned the power plants.

In the past, when demand for power was great, such as during a heat wave, ComEd would buy any extra power it needed from other utilities on the national grid that had excess to sell, or from Canadian utilities that had excess. The bulk of its power came from the generating plants that it owned. Now, in theory, ComEd is buying all of its power at so-called market prices, even though most of it still comes from Exelon plants, and it’s been crying that it will go bankrupt if it doesn’t get a rate increase to cover the inflated price that Exelon and other energy companies like it are charging.

In this case, competition through market forces merely means that a critical resource will be more expensive as private energy companies charge public utilities whatever they like. The energy companies know that the public utilities without their own generating plants have no choice but to pay whatever the going rate is, even if that rate is artificially high.

And this is where getting politicians like State Sen. Emil Jones on their side comes in. ComEd could never get away with huge rate hikes on its own: it needs complicity from politicians and agencies like the commerce commission for that.

Which is exactly why you shouldn’t buy any manure they give you about going broke. You’re already buying an excessively expensive service as it is. What you need is a permanent way to avoid some of that cost, and the legislature’s compromise plan won’t do that. Neither will ComEd’s scam.

So why is anybody listening to either of them?

Next: a public power-generation alternative

2007-10-25T16:19:00.000-05:00

Over 40, smarting, and getting wiser

amended and reposted 10-28-2007 11:21 p.m.
original posted 6-21-2007, 3:44 am

[Note: Since this essay was written, The Starter Wife garnered an Emmy and 10 nominations in all; the award and the response to the program was encouraging enough to USA Network that it decided to turn the mini-series into a regular series for next season. Just when I was ready to start watching again … ]

Hollywood seems to be throwing women over 40 a bone at the moment. But only that much, if indeed that much. The more I consider it, the more it seems to me that popular culture is really patronizing and insulting us, possibly mocking us, too, while playing to our worst fears. None of which is particularly helpful. Or funny.

The first clue I got was the premiere of a new summer mini-series on cable called The Starter Wife. Now there’s a term that makes any woman decidedly uncomfortable: a label for a woman who’s been had by the jerk she was married to when he decided to trade up for a younger, prettier model, as if he were changing cars to reflect career advancement or a more affluent lifestyle. Ouch. It smarts every time you hear the term. We all want to avoid being that woman, and we all privately have at least a tiny doubt that we really could, if push came to shove: how do you ever know for sure, when you’re hopeful and taking those blessed vows, that the guy you’re marrying won’t one day turn into exactly that jerk?

The choice of that title is clearly provocative, probably (or so the network or studio heads thought) to pique interest in the premiere. Actually, I suspect the choice was even more cynical, the thought having occurred to the powers in charge of the program that potential female viewers would have either a streak of masochism or a dose of schadenfreude (there but for the grace of dumb luck go I) that would make them watch. Yet hearing or reading that term ‘starter wife’ is for many women not unlike having a huge bandage that’s stuck to a second-degree burn suddenly ripped off without warning. Which means, in a way, that watching a program about that particular subject is a bit like picking at a scab and making the wound worse instead of just leaving it alone and letting it heal. Charming, all the way around.

The immediate reaction of a woman who’s discovered she’s a starter wife is to think something like “Oh shit, he’s having a midlife crisis, and I’m going to end up paying for it.” That’s once she gets past the sense of hurt, betrayal and panic, of course, because her husband’s turned out to be a lying, skirt-chasing schmuck, and his leaving her (or her leaving him, if she’s discovered his infidelity before he’s ready to make his move) will permanently change her life and more than likely significantly dent her income for years to come, even if she does work. The sense of betrayal is understandably more intense if during the marriage she’s helped him advance significantly in his career by putting him through law or medical or graduate school, being the good corporate wife, managing his family, household, and all his non-career affairs so that he can advance on the job, and/or helping to actually manage part of his career. Probably at the expense of her own situation.

There is, of course, one other reason to watch a program with that title: the hope that somehow, this fictional heroine would find some way to overcome this lousy situation, recover her self-worth and dignity, and, if all goes well, make the schmuck pay – something that doesn’t always happen in real life. Call it looking for inspiration or just plain escapism, but a woman just might want to see a story like that. After all, that’s why a lot of people, male and female, watch soap operas. And summer is, let’s admit it, the season for trashy beach books and pulp fiction; what else is this but the cable TV equivalent?

Still, I was willing to give the program a glance, based on the fact that I like Judy Davis and Joe Mantegna as actors and wondered if the writers were good enough to find a creative solution to the heroine’s problem that I hadn’t thought of yet. I was even prepared to suspend disbelief and feel some initial sympathy for the lead character … until I discovered this was just one more story line about the rich, about status and celebrity. Like we don’t have WAY too much unhealthy focus on that already.

Admittedly, I’m not the target audience for shows like this. I never watch Lifetime or Oxygen, hate so-called reality TV, and absolutely despise American Idol. I’m really, really tired of hearing anything at all about that useless, brainless entity known as Paris Hilton (would TV Guide channel please stop pushing that on me??), I refuse to read anything by Jackie Collins, and I never cared who’s on the hot list at the moment. I don’t read People or tabloids, either, not even in the grocery line, so why should I give a damn about these characters? True, title character Molly is famous only by proxy, because of who her soon-to-be ex is and who her friends are, and she’s stigmatized the moment she’s labeled a starter wife; but she’s also a studio exec’s wife, the friend and possible future girlfriend of a studio head, not desperate in any way by any standard, and not bloody well likely to be, either, once she’s divorced. None of her friends are broke or in danger of being so. Yeah, she’s dating a beach bum who looks like Adonis (like that would happen to me; right), but he used to be an investment banker and is homeless and jobless by choice. Oh, and she has a token stereotype gay decorator friend, and another who’s in rehab. How politically correct, predictable and trite. No, this is a contrived tale about people who really don’t have much of anything in common with the rest of us, and I just can’t work up any sympathy for any of them.

The show is sponsored by Pond’s, a company that purports to be reaching past stereotypical images of beauty even as it adheres to them. It ran a contest to find women over 40 and fabulous who are now featured in its new round of commercials. Unsurprisingly, none of them are less than model lovely. Inner beauty they may have, even inner strength, but so far I’ve noticed that all of them are packaged in plenty of outer beauty (no doubt to better tout Pond’s products). Not a one so far who’s overweight or plain, let alone homely (once again, images of women who seem to have it all, starting with looks). Well, sue me, but I don’t see how this constitutes reaching past conventional definitions of beauty.

Segue to the second instance, a new unreality show with the dubious title Age of Love. Here we have a selection of great-looking babes over 40 (like any of them would really need help with their dating lives, given looks like that) who get to compete against a team of great looking babes under 30, all for the attentions of one great-looking guy, age 30. Like he needs either dating help or more ego gratification instead of a swat upside the head. In a move precious enough to make one vomit, the twentysomethings are dubbed kittens whereas the fortysomethings are labeled cougars, which I’m guessing is supposed to make us over-40s feel flattered.

The key word here, however, is compete – like this is something new and doesn’t prey on all our already hypertuned insecurities where men are concerned. Nearly 50 years after we tried to pass an Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, we’re right back to a clone of The Dating Game, and scores of women are still supposed to be okay with competing for one guy, as if he’s the Second Coming. Clearly the fantasy of an overgrown male adolescent mind, or more likely, a whole hierarchy of overgrown male adolescent minds, some of them studio execs in midlife crisis (in short, minds still hopelessly polluted by hormones and fear of death and devoid of any sense). Nearly 50 years after Masters and Johnson and other researchers told us that women’s sexual peak comes much later in life than men’s does and that we’re clearly more suited to having our own harems instead of being part of one of his, we’re still supposed to feel privileged to compete en masse for one already overprivileged guy. As if men needed another shove toward narcissism. How is this progress? And how is this not supposed to make me feel depressed??

Age of Love is merely another rip-off of male-centered dating game shows. I’d much rather see 20 highly eligible guys competing for one of five smart, talented, accomplished women of less than model-perfect beauty who would challenge their views about what really makes a woman attractive. That is, women who have trouble getting dates precisely because they’re smart and accomplished yet not model perfect. Not Miss America contestants or the cheerleader next door but real women with jobs and lives and quirks who are personable but not automatically compliant or predictable, and certainly not all about making some guy happy. Women who don’t think they should have to compete for any guy. You know, grown-ups. But don’t look for a show like that any time soon, not while men rule the airwaves. Women like that scare men. Hell, a beautiful woman with even average intelligence unsettles men.

Ever notice how the female equivalent dating show, The Bachelorette, got only one season? I’m thinking it was because you can always get the male part of the TV audience to watch a flock of babes competing for one guy and enjoy any cat fights that may result along the way, but watching a group of other guys pose, scheme and grovel to get the attention of one lone woman just makes them squirm – and the majority of scriptwriters, producers, promoters, network honchos, and studio execs are still men. Men who are pursuing a viewing audience of ever-more-elusive teenaged boys and/or men with still-teenaged minds. Oh hell, all of the above. We’re not talking PBS here, folks, meaning any audience with brains that are actually being used most of the time.

Remember, it wasn’t women who created Baywatch or kept it on the air – and there are still a lot more guys who admire that living Barbie doll Pamela Anderson than admire Christiane Amanpour or Aung San Suu Kyi or Maya Angelou or any female business leader, politician, artist, scientist, doctor, lawyer, mathematician, missionary, or peacemaker you can name. A lot of those guys run Hollywood, TV, cable networks, the music business, the trash media (as opposed real news media like the New York Times or the Washington Post, most news magazines, Slate or Salon or BBC), and a lot of other aspects of popular culture. So should we really be surprised that they’re giving women over 40 such short, cynical shrift? Probably not. Yet one would have hoped for at least some improvement by now. Why are modern women still being inundated by popular culture with such destructive, demeaning messages? Why are we still being pushed to pander to men’s vanity, and why is it still supposedly okay for grown men to act out by chasing younger women? Why, for once, can’t men simply grow up and deal with women their own age on their own terms? Could it be that popular culture is still giving them plenty of seeming reasons not to?

The third sign that the TV establishment is still clueless about women is a new show that has bimbos and golddiggers of the ilk of Marla Maples deigning to give average women who’ve been dumped by their men advice on how to get over it. I won’t legitimize it by naming it. We’re talking rich celebrity women for whom the starter wives were dumped, then the bimbo wives were themselves dumped for even younger women and got huge settlements – and they think this now qualifies them to give the rest of us advice. Oh, geez, just shoot me now. As if these pampered has-beens really had anything useful to offer a woman who might really need that child support to keep her kids from going hungry or being homeless, or someone who’s genuinely struggling to keep a job while raising kids (forget dating – no energy left) and doesn’t have the luxury of a live-in nanny, let alone a six- or seven-figure divorce settlement. How much more insulting can you get? I suspect the TV Powers That Be are in a race to answer that question in the worst possible way. And I do mean worst possible.

The bimbo advisers are repulsive to the max; the idea of watching them patronize normal, everyday women who are hurting just gives me the creeps. The latter are better off listening to Dr. Phil, not that his ads for Match.com are all that realistic, either, despite his perky positive palaver (sorry, Phil, some of us have been there, done that, to no avail; Match can keep its extra 6 months free – after all, if they haven’t given you even one decent prospect that stuck after 6 months, why would you give them another six months to make you endure the same degree of failure? That’s not a real selling point).

The Powers That Be in popular culture have just enough sense to figure out that women over 40 aren’t stupid and wield an increasing amount of economic and political clout, even if we still have grossly inadequate representation in boardrooms and legislatures as opposed to households and bedrooms. They know they have to somehow acknowledge that clout, but they just can’t seem to figure out how to do it without shooting themselves in the foot (or, more likely, somewhere higher up and more critical). So they think up these inane TV programs and these pandering commercials and hope we don’t notice that they’re as patronizing and insulting as the disease-or-crisis-of-the-week movies and variations on woman-in-peril plots they’ve been feeding us for years that now provide fodder for Lifetime and Oxygen. Except that many of us do notice, and we stopped watching that crap long ago. Regular TV viewership is declining in favor of other activities (I wish reading was one of them, but unfortunately it’s not). Result? Those Powers That Be are getting worried, deservedly so; but they don’t seem to be getting any smarter. It’ll take a lot more women in the business for that to happen.

Meanwhile, popular culture still pisses me off in its dopey representation of and fare aimed at women. So I’ll just keep reading more books instead, watching more PBS and BBC, and making occasional forays to SciFi Channel, Showtime and HBO for that rare bit of interesting fare when I don’t actually go to the movies, the symphony, the opera, a jazz club, or to live theater. I live in a big city, so I can do that. Instead of unreal dating shows or The Starter Wife, maybe I’ll watch the new season of The Closer or reruns of Battlestar Galactica, where the scripts are great and all the women are smart, strong, and throw a hell of a punch. Or old repeats of The Avengers on BBC so I can watch Emma Peel kick ass with grace in a black catsuit, then smile and drink champagne with John Steed in his sleek Bentley. Or perhaps a new episode of Rome on HBO – if Caesar’s niece and his ex-mistress square off in a cat fight, at least you know they’ll do it with cunning, guile, style, great enunciation, and some damned good lines.

And if all else fails, there’s always Fred and Ginger on Turner Classic Movies or old Kate Hepburn films – not the ones with Spencer Tracy, in which he often treats her badly and whenever they disagree her character always has to be the one to give in, but the ones with Cary Grant (Sylvia Scarlett, Bringing Up Baby, Holiday, The Philadelphia Story), in which her character always holds her own against his and they might disagree, but he likes her all the more for it. It might be escapist fare, but at least it’s classy, constructive escapist fare, and it won’t insult my intelligence. It might even rekindle the hope that men can still snap out of it, get past their midlife crises without reaching for younger women, and improve (oh, that more men were like Paul Newman in that respect! Lucky, lucky Joanne Woodward). Besides, it’s one way I can better spend my time until popular culture and the men who drive it finally catch up and get at least half as wise, witty and forbearing as women over 40 have to be most of the time.

Your move, fellas. Don’t screw up. Oh, and Mr. Clooney, if you’re ready to date an intelligent adult your own age now and talk politics, I’m available.

policywonk is a Chicago-based independent journalist and policy analyst who admits to being over 40, isn’t sure she entirely likes that term cougar for older women, but has been known to purr when she’s pleased and snarl when she’s not. She likes jazz, men, books, science, and the arts, leaves cat fights to her pet feline Mimi, and is still hoping to date a grown-up some day.

2007-05-05T18:49:00.000-05:00

On Starbuck remaining human — and alive, or
Have You Scriptwriters Completely Lost Your Minds??

postscript appended and reposted 5-6-2007 5:41 p.m.
original post 5-5-2007 11:56 p.m.

I heard a rumor the other day — afterwards confirmed by reading online posts — that Starbuck is the fifth and final previously unknown Cylon model. The fact that she appears to Apollo at the end of the season finale of Battlestar Galactica (or was he hallucinating, like Baltar the mad scientist?) is supposed to make the matter clear. I understand that even Ron Moore has confirmed this (forgive me for bringing it up at this late date, but I only recently saw a tape of the finale, not having functioning cable myself).

Another bombshell in a show loaded with them, you say. Nope: just a bomb, as in dud. In fact, for the first time since the series began, Moore has made a really dumb error. How unexpected and disappointing that in searching for a final twist for the episode, he should go for a solution so trite, superfluous, and, if you think about it, predictable. He’d practically telegraphed it. Bo-ring …

How much more interesting if poor Starbuck were to return and still remain human, only to be disbelieved. Feared. Spurned.

Consider:

• In the season finale, four of the last five Cylon models are revealed simultaneously. It makes absolute sense for both Tory, the president’s aide and Col. Tigh, the admiral’s XO to be Cylon sleepers: in making those closest to the civilian and military leaders Cylons, the enemy has automatic access to the most useful intelligence and a way to track both leaders. The Cylons know every move nearly as soon as the human leaders make it. Same reasoning applies to the chief engineer, Tyrol: he has a key position.

• If you want to undermine the faith and trust the president and admiral have for those around them and make them doubt all their relationships, sow fear and dissent, etc., then revealing the leaders’ right hands — one of them the admiral’s oldest and dearest comrade — as Cylons is more than enough to do the job. Making the woman he loved like a daughter and depended on as a top pilot a Cylon, too, is superfluous, overkill. It adds nothing more to either Adama’s fears or to the story line.

• If Starbuck is supposed to be a Cylon, why did the Cylons have to remove genetic material from her while she was captive at the baby factory on Caprica? They wouldn’t need it if they’d made her — and already had multiple copies of her. Taking her ovary only makes sense if she’s human.

• If Starbuck is a Cylon, what’s the rationale for making Anders one? There’s no strategic advantage to that — but it is good strategy to make him one if she’s not, especially if there’s something very special about an all-too-human Starbuck and they need a way to keep tabs on her.

• If Starbuck is really a Cylon, what’s the point of them messing with her on New Caprica and sending Leoben to scam her about the child being hers? That only makes sense if Starbuck is human and meant to be something spectacular — and the Cylons are desperate to co-opt her, demoralize her, control her, use her because of it.

Yes, the plot lines definitely need to shake up viewers’ expectations to keep the series interesting — but not simply for the sake of surprise. In advancing the plot, the writers also have to give viewers something they can hold on to as well as characters they can care about without sabotaging those characters. Starbuck is a deeply flawed person with a self-destructive streak — but also a clever, funny, joyous, seemingly fearless spirit who’s also a brilliant pilot and a fierce, matchless warrior as a human, which is part of why we love her. And for the viewers, there has to be at least one human character who can go toe to toe with the Cylons and make them blink for a change. How deliciously ironic that that person should be the deeply screwed up Starbuck, given how much the Cylons despise self-doubting, unstable, unpredictable characters with messy emotions like hers. Which is perhaps the biggest reason we love her, that and her ability to kick Cylon butt.

Take that away by making her a Cylon, and you’ve told humanity that even at its best, it can never defeat the Cylons on its own: rather, it will need Cylon defectors because it is too weak to do the job alone. Depressing. Worse, you’ve also established that the Cylons have the means to follow the colonists all the way back to Earth and will undoubtedly do so. Then you’ve really taken away the viewers’ reason to care about what happens. While there was doubt, there was hope; kill the doubt by making Starbuck a Cylon, and you’ve killed hope (and with it, a significant portion of the viewership). Bad move. Idiot move, in fact.

But it’s too late: we (and Lee) saw Starbuck die. Or did we? How else can she return if she’s not a Cylon? As a hallucination? Nah, that’s a cop-out, and overused if Moore resorts to that.

True, we (and Lee) saw Starbuck’s ship explode as it dropped further and further down into the gas giant’s gravity well. But does that mean she died there? How much more interesting if she had a last-minute change of heart out of fear or survival instinct, as do many would-be suicides, and ejected just before her craft exploded, was rendered unconscious by the blast as she shot free of the debris — and was retrieved by a stealthed Cylon craft that had been waiting just inside the gas giant’s atmosphere for just such an occasion, having trailed Starbuck this far.

And why track Starbuck to the gas giant? Why prevent her suicide? Because the Cylons know something really big about her, know of a lost prophecy about her that not even her human mother or the president’s oracle, for all her knowledge of scripture, knew: that Kara would be the one who would discover where Earth was. Given that, the Cylons wouldn’t be content with the human petting zoo they had on New Caprica. They’d want to control her — or at least stay very, very close to her — so that they could ultimately control the totality of humanity. Because they saw their own future reborn on old Earth.

Starbuck is ornery, however, and can be maddeningly elusive even when the Cylons have imprisoned her. Thus, their need to monitor Starbuck and put Anders in her path on Caprica, eventually in her arms and in her life. They know that having fallen for him, she’ll return for him. She’ll keep him close.

But not every human-looking Cylon wants Starbuck to lead them to Earth. Some merely wish her to discover the location and surrender the information. At least one Six would rather reserve even that honor for herself: the one who fought her for the Arrow of Apollo and lost. All of which means the Cylons need leverage if they want to control Starbuck. Having tried and failed to create human hybrids on Caprica, even with Starbuck’s genetic material, they then try to clone her. And fail again. But she escapes, which is why they resort to outright fraud with the child on New Caprica later on.

Once Starbuck escapes Caprica with the arrow, the Cylons have to let the prophecy play out. Especially now that Anders is by her side on Galactica. Nice move: another monitor close at hand.

How much more interesting, then, that the Cylons track her and are there to rescue her from the gas giant and certain death because they know from the prophecy that her near-death experience will trigger the events that lead Starbuck to learn Earth’s location. This is information they must have at any cost.

When she wakes and finds she’s recovering on a Cylon base star, Kara herself thinks she’s a Cylon and despairs for a moment, trying to think of other ways to kill herself. She’s stopped and quickly disabused by a sympathetic Boomer model, who is fascinated by the prophecy and reveals it to Starbuck in an attempt to keep Kara from harming herself further. The Boomer even tells her about Anders and the failed attempt to clone her. But she also warns Starbuck bluntly that if she doesn’t cooperate by telling the Cylons what she knows about Earth, they’ll force the information from her. She also points out that should Starbuck manage to escape and return to Galactica, nobody will believe that she’s not a Cylon.

“We don’t need you to actually be one of us,” the Boomer notes. “We just need them to think you are. That’s enough.” Starbuck shocks and disturbs the Boomer by suddenly laughing out loud. “You can’t kill me,” she retorts, grinning. “You can’t afford to let me die, and there’s nothing you can do about it. And I’ll never tell you anything — I’d rather die first. This is great!” She laughs again, beside herself.

“We’ll see about that,” replies an angry Six who’s been eavesdropping.

How much more interesting, then, that at that moment, Starbuck doesn’t care that she’ll be suspected once she returns: she has something the Cylons want and humanity needs. Dream, vision, hallucination, or just her subconscious having worked out all the clues and connected the dots — it doesn’t matter to her how she knows where Earth is. She just can’t wait to tell Lee and his father and see the shock on their faces when she turns up alive. She refuses to believe that there won’t be some way short of autopsy to prove she’s not Cylon, that they won’t eventually believe her. And she figures that telling them about Anders should buy her some slack.

How much more interesting that Starbuck decides to return to Earth anyway and manages, once again, to escape her confinement and steal one of several colonial flyers that the Cylons still have around (no, the Cylons don’t make that easy: they’d rather she didn’t escape this time). How much more interesting that once she escapes, the Cylons choose that moment to develop a line of Kara counterfeits they can use in the future to further mess with the colonists. Not copies: they can’t clone her, due to some unforeseen abnormalities in her DNA, but they can sure make more Cylons that at least look like her.

Consider: from the start, we’re told that there are only x-number of human-looking Cylon models, and it’s repeated so often that we believe it. Yet this number is purely arbitrary, as any number probably would be. Having created that many models, there’s no reason the Cylons can’t create yet another, especially if there’s some strategic advantage. The Kara line will all be genetically identical to each other, but not quite identical to the original, given Starbuck’s dicey DNA and one particularly funky marker. As Starbuck herself will recall at a later opportune moment and point out to the admiral, there’s something unique about her that makes the Cylons crazy and makes her absolutely identifiable.

“How do I know that’s true?” counters the Old Man. “Until one of your cheap knock-offs turns up and we can compare your DNA to hers, you have no proof. All I know is that you’re the same Starbuck I knew before — we have your DNA on record. Still doesn’t mean you’re not a Cylon.” Adama, who’s grieved the loss of her mightily, wants to believe her but can’t afford to. Yet he can’t really afford not to, either, in the short term: what if she does know where Earth is? If she’s Cylon, she could be leading the enemy to what remains of humanity; but if she’s human, that means there’s hope …

“You’ll know,” Starbuck replies, smiling disarmingly at the father figure she loves so much. “You always figure it out.”

They all so want to believe her, even the recalcitrant, ambivalent Lee, who still has feelings for her and therefore will be the last to be persuaded (yet another issue for him and his dad to fight about). They need to believe her: she’s their girl, their touchstone, their flawed, damaged, infuriating, vulnerable star, the one they all pin their hopes on. And so do we.

Which brings me back to my point: we all need Starbuck to be human. We need that hope. Remove that from the story line, and you’ve killed any reason for us to keep on watching Galactica. The sorry unraveling begins there.

As TV Guide would say: don’t jump the shark on this one, Ron. Not unless you’re ready to write off the rest of the series. Then again, if you do as advised and leave her human, that means there’s still one more Cylon model to be discovered … What fun.

ps — In the Starbuck-is-still-human scenario, I'm betting that the 12th Cylon model turns out to be Dualla. Makes sense for the communications officer to be one, too — and what else could freak out Lee more than having married a toaster? Whoopee! The foreshadowing is already there, BTW, in the cool, calculated, amoral approach to sex that Dee has before she finally hooks up with Apollo, not unlike a certain Six has before Caprica falls ...

pps — Kara, like all the other lead female characters, really needs to evolve. Having been through the ordeals of season 3, we need her to keep the best of her strengths, like her joyous abandon in flying to beat everyone else, her take-no-prisoners attitude, and her willingness to challenge hypocrisy and be skeptical about the conventional wisdom. But she also needs to have learned to put thriving on equal terms with surviving (just surviving isn't enough if you REALLY want to beat the Cylons) and to have tempered that willingness to challenge with the wisdom to choose better just which fights to pick and which ones to drop, making that willingness to challenge status quo, authority, naivete, etc., much less of a knee-jerk reaction on her part and a more well-considered action instead. Kara needs to grow up, even if that means outgrowing both Lee and Anders for a while, because the fleet needs her to be a rational adult without losing that happy spontaneity, intuition, and street-smart sense we love in her. And if Moore lets her stay human as advised above while letting her grow up a bit, she's going to be all the more interesting. For heaven's sake, give us a strong, adult, radiant Starbuck that we can believe instead of turning her into either a stupid, depressed suicide or a mystical figure! She can fulfill that prophecy credibly by retaining those best qualities that we love, not by losing them. Show that she can learn to cope, adapt, and maybe Apollo can take a few pointers from her for a change.

2006-12-11T23:18:00.000-06:00

Discovering ‘The Fountain’
posted 12-11-2006

Darren Aronovsky’s film “The Fountain” was meant to be an indie film. This, despite the fact that big studios were involved early on during nearly ten years’ worth of attempts to make the film, attempts that always fell through for one reason or another, until Aronovsky decided to make it on his own. That meant giving up all the resources that connection to a major studio might provide, including costly special effects and computer-generated imagery. In the end, Aronovsky returned to his indie background in order to get the film made, and the film is better for it.

Remarkable. That’s the first word that occurs once one has seen it.

Raw. Powerful. Provocative. Moving. It’s all that. The editing is so tight and artless that it’s invisible – the flow feels completely uninterrupted. The casting is precisely right: you’d never guess that Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz weren’t Aronovsky’s original choices for the lead roles. Weisz seems born to have been Izzie. Jackman is a revelation: you realize as you watch him that you really didn’t know him before, that you didn’t know he had this in him. And that he’d been wasted in everything he’d done before this. Ellen Burstyn is pitch-perfect in what could have been a throwaway supporting role. In fact, everyone is pitch-perfect. No one sets a foot wrong; there’s not one extraneous gesture, not one wrong word anywhere. Even the sets and locations hit just the right note in atmosphere.

The effects seem like only an extension of the atmospherics that Aronovsky sets up in the other scenes; they’re really that good, they flow logically from the story line, and not one bit of CGI is involved. The ethereal quality of those effects and the incredible depth to them is due to the fact that the images are real ones from the biological world that don’t have to be flashy to be marvelously effective, rather than flat inventions from the FX lab – but I won’t spoil it for you by giving away what Aronovsky used (those who are curious about it will find the surprising answer in other reviews and interviews about the film; try reading the New York Times pieces first).

Suffice it to say that Nature is a much better FX master than anyone in Hollywood or up on George Lucas’s ranch, and that the patterns she creates are often reused or referenced on both a micro and a macro scale where you least expect them. Aronovsky had the good sense to capitalize on that, with hypnotic results that draw you further into the film. The astronomical imagery is every bit as powerful as that used by Kubrick in “2001: A Space Odyssey” and will, I predict, persist in the filmgoer’s imagination almost as strongly as Kubrick’s did.

So far, so good – but what’s it about, you ask.

One could say that it’s about reincarnation, but that’s not it. Not really. That would be misleading. One could say that it’s about devotion, obsession, passion. Or that it’s about two souls traveling through history together, wherein one keeps trying to save the other but always runs out of time; just at the critical moment, success comes too late. Or about an enduring connection, or another swipe at the Inquisition, or about the timidity and cosmic blindness of most people. Or that it’s about the proposition that all aspects and eras of time exist simultaneously, and people live their lives in parallel in more than one era. Or that it’s about turning loss into redemption. In truth, it’s about a little bit of each of those things, and a lot about something else.

Not unlike Steven Soderbergh’s underrated “Solaris,” Aronovsky’s “The Fountain” is a meditation on the nature of existence; and like “Solaris,” it’s brooding and thought provoking in just the right amount. In fact, they’re both “2001” redux in that respect. You leave the theater immediately wanting to talk to someone about what the film means, what you think some of the theories hinted at might mean, what the consequences are. Whether or not things really are this way. What it truly means to live forever. You find yourself wanting to think about it and talk about it for days before you finally get around to saying, ”Oh yeah, by the way – it’s really good. You have to go see it.” The subject matter reels you in that effectively. It grabs at both sides of your brain and expands your thinking even as it entertains, and you’re so taken by the film that you barely notice until much later. The result is both oddly sobering and surprisingly satisfying.

When I left the theater, I had two immediate questions on my mind. One was about that possibility of living out simultaneous parallel lives as if all eras of time coexisted at once. The other was about consequences. Isabel gives Thomas a mission, a charge, a purpose that is greater than himself or his own life; he gives her the devotion, the strength, the support that allows her to grasp that larger purpose and explain it to him, make him see why it’s necessary. The task benefits humanity, but he takes it on for her, and her alone.

What if you’re Tommy/Tomás but you never meet the Izzie/Isabella who gives your discoveries meaning, or gives you the drive to make them in the first place? What if you’re the Izzie who sees what the discovery will mean, or why the sacrifice is necessary, but you never meet the one who has to take it on, the one you’d inspire? Or you never get anyone who will listen and love and support you enough so that you have the strength to arrive at the insight in the first place? What are the consequences for you and everyone else then?

One thinks: I was meant to have someone love me that much. I need that person, someone my own work can inspire and who can inspire me, who would do for me what really needs doing for the greater good so that I, too, can work for the greater good in my own way. I’m an analyst: I see how things are. I understand that kind of passion, that degree of devotion. I need it to fuel what I must do; and what I do best is think, then communicate. Provocative productive thinking takes a lot of mental and emotional energy; so does survival. Sometimes, you have just enough energy for one and not enough for the other. Not if you’re alone. But if there were two of you, together ...

One thinks further: I need someone to love me that much, so that I can do what I was meant to in the meager time alotted. I need that support system. But he hasn’t shown up. My Thomas/Tommy/Tomás is nowhere to be seen, and time is running short. I can invent him, but I cannot make him real — Nature, fate, or the cosmos must do that. What are the consequences if he never appears? If one parallel life fails, do the others simultaneously fail as well? Can I still fix my own timeline at this stage? Would it be enough for him to appear in just one of these simultaneous lives, or must he be there in all of them? What would it take to get him to show up now, if only in this life? And what would I have to give up, in payment?

You’ll want to see this film again. It will imprint itself upon you and lodge in the mind, lingering. You’ll be disturbed yet drawn to all the questions. And seeing it again will be its own reward. That is Aronovsky’s triumph.

I hope he laughs all the way to the bank and never has to make another studio film again.

2006-09-29T17:54:00.000-05:00

On losing habeas corpus
posted 9-29-2006

The end of habeas corpus.

With the capitulation of the Senate, the dotard George W. Bush has undone 200 years of legal protection for all Americans, and the public has said nothing. It may not even be aware, despite the news coverage.

This is so deeply disturbing that one doesn't even know where to begin. If one needed more evidence of the aggressively witless bombast of the chief executive or what depraved, power-crazed jackals he has for counselors in Cheney and Rumsfeld, this would be it.

For those who are blissfully unaware, having been going about their daily business without really paying attention to the news, the U.S. Senate, under pressure from the White House and after some token protest by Republican moderates, caved in and came to a compromise agreement on a bill that allows suspected terrorists to be held indefinitely, without being charged and without legal representation. They need not be told why they are being held or what their supposed crimes are, need not be told what evidence — if any — there is against them, need not be given any opportunity or means to defend themselves, for as long as government officials see fit.

This is a move that rankles not only legal scholars and civil libertarians but that also gives the military's Judge Advocate General corps pause. The latter has worriedly pointed out to anyone who will listen that this sets a dangerous precedent and can be used against our own troops abroad. Bush fils is not among those who are listening.

The catch here is that it isn't merely our troops who are endangered by curtailing habeas corpus. What can be done to the few can be done to the many. This is a direct threat to you and me. All that's required is for some government agency to decide that you're a suspect, reasonably or not, and you vanish into the legal system, perhaps forever — without rights or recourse. This bill endangers all of us from this moment on, unless and until the Supreme Court decides to slap the president upside the head with the Constitution and undo the damage. And that can't happen until someone sues to challenge the bill. That could take a while.

Meanwhile, we have all been stripped of two centuries' worth of legal protection that the Revolutionary War was fought to give us. Under habeas corpus, a government or authority must produce the accused and either show cause why the accused should be held or release the person. Holding people in custody without charges, without explanation, without representation or recourse is exactly what the British did to the American colonists, which explains why the founding fathers were so insistent on protecting the right of habeas corpus once the colonies became a nation.

Habeas corpus goes to the heart of who we are as a people and the rights we believe in, the kind of government we have. It is at the core of the Constitution. In damaging habeas corpus, we undo the base structure of democratic self-government. This isn't an insect bite or a paper cut on the body politic — it's breaking bones. If W. Bush didn't learn at least this much in law school, then he learned nothing at all.

Suspending habeas corpus is a big enough deal that it's only been done once in U.S. history. Abraham Lincoln suspended it at the start of the Civil War, and even he was uneasy about it. When the time came to renew that suspension, he asked Congress to undo the deed instead. And so it was, until now. Except that Bush, et al., aren't talking about merely suspending habeas corpus; suspension implies that there would be a time limit, and the Bush cabal makes no such promises. Not that their promises would be worth anything anyway, as much lying as they've done in six years.

The end of habeas corpus, W. claims, is what we need to prosecute the War on Terror more effectively; but as that isn't a real war against a real state but instead a violent clash of political, cultural and religious hegemony and ideas, promoted by individuals, the risk will forever be there. Which means it's the Neverending War, and we can expect W. and his ilk to give us more truckloads of manure in the form of reasons why they need to cut yet more civil liberties in the future. Believe it: this is only the beginning, as those who warned us about the Patriot Act foretold.

This, unlike lying about whether or not an intern was sucking you off under the Oval Office desk, is an act truly worthy of impeachment. This threatens the people, therefore the nation, far more than terrorists. But impeachment, of course, will never happen unless the voters give Democrats the majority in both House and Senate in November. How much more provocation does the public need?

This, THIS is the moment Santayana referred to when he said that those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it. This is the reason you should have been paying attention in American History class, why you shouldn't have been whining about studying the U.S. Constitution because you were supposedly never going to use that knowledge again in adulthood: so that you could recognize the moment when an arrogant, autocratic political idiot-savant like George W. Bush was gutting your future, and speak up. So that you'd know a power grab when you saw it and could defend yourself against a politician who treats government like his own personal dynasty — by firing him.

And if you don't speak up now, if you don't beat down the doors of the White House with calls and e-mails and deluge your congressmen and senators with protests, you deserve every bit of despotism that will be visited upon you as a result. Every last one of you who said nothing will have earned this: it will be your fault every bit as much as George Bush's.

Unfortunately, however, the disastrous consequences will also be imposed on the rest of us, even though we may have protested long and loudly and voted our consciences.

Pardon me if I'm more than a little bit pissed off about that.

2006-08-15T19:27:00.000-05:00

Snark Bytes

8-15-2006
USAVoice.org: Add another thud

Now you just knew it wasn't going to end there with the last e-mail from USAVoice, now didn't you? (See previous two posts.) Sure enough, I got one inviting me to sign up for a one-hour conference call that sounded like maybe it would finally be an interview of sorts with real people participating (besides me, that is; and I wasn't by any means the only one 'invited' — see the comment at the end of the first post).

No such luck: when I went to the sign-up page, it was headlined Training Call. Now there's a dead giveaway if ever I saw one. It's the kind of thing one expects when one is being considered for a job at a call center, not for an editing or reporting position. Not only have they not yet interviewed me, let alone made a job offer, but they reveal that the call will actually be 90 minutes long, that participating in the call doesn't yet constitute a job offer, that there will be several other 'candidates' on the line with us but that we won't be able to talk or be heard while the 'lecture' is going on, that I have to be able to talk on the phone during the conference call while being online (I guess those of us 'candidates' who are forced to use dial-up Internet were out of luck, eh?), and that I should take careful notes. Oh, and this was going to be a long-distance call, with no mention of it being toll free.

Let me see now: it's 90 minutes long distance at my expense, they're contradicting the information they gave me earlier, they're being evasive about who they are and where they're located, they haven't made me any job offer or even interviewed me yet, but they want me to take careful notes. Uh-huh. And no, as of today, August 15, USAVoice still isn't up and running as any kind of news outlet.

So, having been 'invited' by the ghosts at USAVoice to participate at my own expense in a 90-minute long-distance conference call that turned out to be a training session — if that doesn't smell, then dogs crap rose petals — I decided that my time and money were better spent reading about Hezbollah in the New York Times. The Times may be establishment and it may be flawed, but at least it's a real news operation — which is more than I can say about USAVoice. And at least I know who owns the mainstream media.

If that weren't enough, it turns out that whoever is claiming to be Klaas de Vries Jr. regularly surfs the Web, enough to have found this humble blog and enough to want to ensure that his name gets in, and in the manner he would prefer (sorry, bubba, the first you get, the second you don't). Hey, too bad — I don't give a damn about his personal battles with supposed impostors or alleged perpetrators of frauds. I wanted to know something about USAVoice, and that's the only reason his name came up. No, I won't post his useless comment, either, because it had nothing to do with USAVoice; and before we go any further, let me now state the policy of this blog regarding giving anybody free publicity I don't think they deserve:

**It is the policy of PoliticalEye not to publish comments simply because they are sent, but because they are relevant and, to the extent that the senders make claims, those can, when necessary, be demonstrated to be true. We don't give anyone carte blanche to simply peddle their own propoganda — you can get your own blog for that. Nor are we, by extension, either PR flaks nor stenographers: there will be no 'he said, she said' stories here. If you don't like it, blog away somewhere else. We don't care.** — The Director

Now, then: having stated the official policy, let me add this: oh yes I *DID* do searches with the name "Klaas de Vries Jr" — you're dead wrong about that, mister — and those didn't produce anything useful. There is nothing that I was able to retrieve that indicates you are either a journalist or working for a legitimate news organization in any way. Your claims do not constitute proof, and though you may be a blogger, merely that by itself does not a journalist make.

Moreover, all I was able to pull up were more pages of you either complaining to someone else about alleged fraud that has yet to be proven, carping about how someone else is impersonating you (also unproven), ranting about this persistent nemesis of yours named Defrawy, or struggling to be some kind of author or entrepreneur, to which end there are mentions of you possibly trying to represent artists and of a supposedly 'hilarious' published exchange between you and someone claiming to be an African prince. None of which is relevant to my reportage on USAVoice. And I've had far more expert people than I sussing out domain info on USAVoice, none of which produced anything useful, either. Whoever is behind that outfit, they remain shadows — and that alone is highly suspicious in the news business, which needs to be far more transparent than that.

Good luck in your entrepreneurial endeavors, whoever you are, and please leave news reporting to real reporters: you haven't the skill for it.

Now, then: anyone heard anything more about NewAssignment.Net?? I'm dying to know if they're going to make a real go of it, and whether independent journalists such as yours truly have even a ghost of a chance of getting work from them.

Until next time ...

2006-08-03T02:03:00.000-05:00

Snark Bytes

8-3-2006
USAVoice.org: Just another dud on the media landscape

Well, it’s official: USAVoice is just another irritating, hype-laden non-starter out there in the ether. Having billed itself as the Internet’s answer to CNN (as if that wasn’t a dead giveaway right there), it missed its debut deadline — twice in one month — and hasn’t uttered a peep. As of Wednesday, August 2nd, its home page was still promising a start date of July 31st, and nothing new had been added to the site that this writer could find. All of which tempts one to say: Get lost, you bloody pretenders — and quit jerking around my colleagues!

Even if they eventually make an appearance and start doing business as a news outlet, at this point they’ve already lost what little credibility any such start-up might have. And that’s the kiss of death.

At a time when so many mid-career journalists are out of work and would jump at the chance to do real, serious journalism, it seems particularly cruel for someone to advertise reporting and editing jobs on the scale that this outfit did (see previous blog entry below). The only result that I’ve been able to detect is the raising of a lot of false hopes and, possibly, a marketing-related con job. Then again, many applicants were wary from the start, including yours truly. Thankfully, we journalists are naturally a suspicious, skeptical lot, and I’d like to think that few of us put much trust in this particular scam.

But I’m still wondering where the money came from for all those job ads …

Another, more promising effort along similar lines seems to be on the horizon: NewAssignment.Net, a project that NYU media critic and academic Jay Rosen introduced last week in his media blog, Pressthink. It has some interesting thinking behind it and some real start-up money, including a contribution from Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist.com.

NewAssignment sounds like an attempt to merge citizen journalism with professional journalism, thereby covering stories and issues that larger, established media outlets might skip or miss. It will use real journalists to do the writing and editing, Rosen says, but story ideas will typically originate from within a community.

I’m still not completely clear myself on just what the difference is between civic journalism, citizen journalism, and plain old-fashioned journalism, nor am I entirely comfortable with the notion of being a community journalist for hire — I’ll have more to say about that and about Rosen’s project in my next post — and I wouldn’t go so far yet as to call Rosen’s idea intriguing; but for now, let’s just say that at least it’s being discussed, tested and tweaked out in the open and we know who’s behind it, which is more than anyone can say about USAVoice. And if NewAssignment gets off the ground soon, I’ll be right up there at the front of the line with everyone else, hoping to get one of those bright, shiny new assignments.

Hey, a gal’s gotta make a living …

Meanwhile, there’s Nicholas Lemann’s article on citizen journalism/blogging, in The New Yorker:
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/060807fa_fact1

2006-07-28T23:16:00.000-05:00

Tales of the New Media: Is USAVoice.org Real?

There’s a new wanna-be news organization ready to burst onto the scene that claims it will be to the Internet what CNN was 20 years ago to broadcasting. In fact, it intends to displace CNN and other major news organizations in the hearts and minds of average readers and viewers. Or so it says.

Well, maybe … that is, if the organization in question really exists and if news gathering, rather than marketing or something else more nefarious in media clothing, is its real motive. There seems to be considerable room for doubt. But one thing is certain: you don’t advertise for 1,200 positions in online job sites like Careerbuilder or Yahoo! HotJobs without having some big bucks to throw around.

The enterprise calls itself USAVoice, and it’s had a lot of journalists wondering just what’s going on. The new news venue was supposed to start business on July 4th but put that off until month’s end. It’s been advertising since late June for editors and writers en masse in the states, possibly internationally — but it isn’t really interested in applicants with legitimate journalism backgrounds or experience. Moreover, nobody seems to know who’s behind this effort or where they came from, let alone where they’re really located, and they appear to be connected to at least one possible con artist.

If it’s a scam, it’s a pretty expensive one for the perpetrators, unless they expect to be able to make money somehow from mining and/or selling the job applicants’ information. And if it’s legitimate attempt to form a new news outlet, why all the secrecy?

Billing its product as “honest and unfiltered” (shades of Fox News?), USAVoice portrays itself on its home page and in its marketing as the populist answer to CNN and other establishment news organizations worldwide:

“ … USA Voice is poised to become the largest peer-to-peer news organization in the world. USA Voice is to the news industry what CNN once was, namely:
We are independent
We are not governed by corporate politics
We are international
“The power and reach of the Internet allows USA Voice to be the largest, truly unfiltered news organization. Currently USA Voice is hiring reporters in over 2,500 markets around the world. … “
“ … CNN gave us the closest thing to independent press in Iraq 1; USA Voice is stepping up to fill the void CNN left when they went corporate during Iraq 2.”

The first red flag is in the phrase ‘peer-to-peer news organization’ — one immediately wonders whether this is supposed to work like Napster or an RSS feed, but let’s set that aside for a moment.

Here’s what USAVoice.org has to say for itself on its political news page:

“ … USAvoice.org will report news and information from the local, national, and international viewpoint but, unlike almost any other news source, our reporters and editors will be Mr. and Ms. Everyday Citizen, not the traditionally trained journalism school product. It’s what you see and how you think that will make the content of USA Voice. People who have never had a chance to show what they can do in reporting will be paid to post their stories and the world will reply with their thoughts and comments. It really IS the ‘voice of the people’.”

Uh-huh. Setting aside the fact that the above copy is self-serving merchandising hype, let’s consider what else it might say about the alleged organization. In reading the excerpt above, one is immediately struck by the need for a copy editor and by the lack of professionalism (not to mention credibility) that this indicates; but I digress. The group’s hype essentially boasts that it will put reporting in the hands of amateurs and implies that this is a good thing.

Here’s an excerpt from its jobs page:

“Not wanting to give another outlet to the journalism factories that exist all around us today, USA Voice will hire average people to write and report news and features for our online publication. These will be paid positions for those who can find a story and tell it in an interesting and concise way that informs the world, not tries to influence it. Here’s the place where you, your friends, and your neighbors will place your own comments about what you read … any and all of it. And it is now and will always be 100% absolutely free to participate.” Huh?? You mean there’s some news outlet for which reader/viewer feedback isn’t free? Or does it mean the folks at USAVoice considered charging for feedback and then dropped the idea? Either alternative would be disturbing.

Further down the home page is this revealing tidbit:

“Paid staffers update the news and information you want to hear about. You can look for show schedules and dining tips and reviews … and perhaps earn some significant money for yourself while you do it. Wouldn’t it be great if the networks paid YOU to check out their presentations?”

Now that sounds more like a marketing scheme than journalism. Then there’s this from the home page: “Reporters are judged based on their feedback and traffic of their stories. … USA Voice allows the readers to vote with their eyes, and with their keyboard.” Uh, does that mean that news about developments people don’t like won’t get read and reporters will be penalized for that? Sounds an awful lot like shooting the messenger.

One wonders whether that will affect how much reporters are paid: will those who cover unpalatable news that the public still needs to know about be punished financially for writing ‘sad’ news instead of happy talk? What happened to informing the citizenry so that those citizens can make informed decisions, and self-government might really mean something? Aren’t we undermining democracy by only reporting what people want to read, not what they need to know?

Then there’s the matter of how USAVoice will hire; they’re conventional about advertising open positions, using the usual online classified ads. What appeared to be legitimate employment ads showed up in late June on Careerbuilder, Monster, Yahoo! HotJobs, and other online job listings sites. What soon followed were questions in chat rooms and on bulletin boards as to just who is behind USAVoice. The questions were triggered by the remarkable lack of any information about this potential employer and by the fact that most people interested in applying are themselves journalists or journalism students, who are (unsurprisingly) usually a skeptical lot.

Bear in mind that this is happening during a bad six-year hiring stretch for journalists across the country. The dot-com bust triggered falling advertising sales and job losses in other fields, journalism included. Many experienced mid-career journalists have been unceremoniously dumped from the ranks of our profession while their younger colleagues have been pushed to the point of burnout. The web site IWantMedia.com tracks the continuing job cuts in journalism resulting from closures, consolidations, mergers and acquisitions, and general downsizings:

“Media companies are continuing to tighten their belts and, sadly, cut jobs. Many cutbacks are attributed to the slowing economy and advertising market, disappointing results at online units, restructurings in the aftermath of mergers, and business shutdowns (Remember APBNews.com? Talk magazine?).
“This tabulation of news reports of U.S. media layoffs, begun shortly after the start of the dot-com bust, has recorded nearly 72,000 job cuts since June 2000.”

Layoffs on this scale mean that not everyone can make a living freelancing – it’s a buyer’s market. Consequently, there are way too many unemployed and underemployed journalists out there still hoping to be rehired for legitimate positions in media companies, as well as young, inexperienced journalists having a difficult time starting out. That makes many of us willing to entertain employment at less-than-traditional media outlets, which in turn leaves some (yes, even journalists) vulnerable to employment scams.

The desultory and secretive applications process at USAVoice.org merely raised more eyebrows. Applicants were first directed to the group’s web site, then asked about only the sketchiest of information through an online fill-in-the-blanks form, after which they were assured that a reply would be forthcoming in a few days; but no further information was provided. Applicants then received an e-mail response a few days later, providing them with a username and password to a protected section of the web site and inviting them to submit more information for further consideration. However, applicants who did so were asked for only slightly more data than before, none of it job specific — the online form only included questions about why applicants thought they could do the job and their educational backgrounds — and were given no opportunity to provide any information about job experience or to submit a cover letter, resume, clips, or any other supporting material that might testify to an applicant’s suitability for a reporting or editing position.

Again, during and after the application process, no information was provided to applicants about the company, its corporate or editorial managers, its location, or even its phone or fax numbers. Likewise, there is no masthead on the site and no information on editorial policies, target audiences, advertising or other financial support, or employee benefits. Moreover, contact names given in the ads and initial e-mail response form letters appear fictional (see more on that below).

I applied myself before July 4th, just to see what would happen. I got the customary form-letter e-mail thanking me for applying and assuring me that they’d get back to me in a few days, followed by one that led me to their online application page and the sparse questions. Then, after a few weeks of hearing nothing more, I received the following e-mail on July 14th:

“Dear XXXXX,

“Recently you applied to fill the position of Editor with USA Voice. Due to unforeseeable technical difficulties, an e-mail left our server with incorrect information and some applicant information was deleted. Please disregard the previous e-mail and accept my apologies for any confusion this may have caused.

“I am still very interested in considering you for this position. Please log into your account at www.usavoice.org and complete the final application. (If you have already done so, please go back and resubmit your information)

“Username: XXXXXXX
Password: XXXXXXX

“I apologize for the inconvenience and look forward to speaking with you soon.

“Kind Regards,
Hugh Richards, CEO
USA Voice "Honest and Unfiltered"
www.USAVoice.org

What technical difficulties could there be that a) they couldn’t specify, and b) would require another mass e-mailing to applicants? (Other journalists and writers report on various bulletin board discussion threads that they received the same ‘please resubmit’ e-mail.) How do we know this isn’t an attempt to form a huge mailing list for marketing purposes? And what company wouldn’t be willing to tell you at the very least where they’re located?

Needless to say, despite the shadowy Mr. Richards’s assurances that he wanted to speak with me, I never got a phone call — and when I tried to log in again to resubmit my information, the group’s server kept throwing me back to the site’s home page. Today, however (July 28), when I tried to log in again, I got to a page that merely thanked me for submitting information — without actually letting me submit any. Nice touch. Is it any wonder that applicants feel like they’re getting the run-around?

As of July 28, there’s no phone listing or any other directory listing for either a Hugh Richards or USAVoice in Las Vegas or the surrounding area. At least, not that I could find under those names. There may be a listing if the organization has a corporate parent with a different name; no clue there.

If there is a real would-be media or other organization behind USAVoice.org, there is no evidence of it, nor are there any clues to what financing or editorial management, if any, is behind it. It’s understandable that applicants would be concerned; they provided a certain amount of personal information in the applications process, and they rightfully want to know who has it and how it’s going to be used: if not for real jobs at a real news organization, then how? And by whom? For that matter, how does a seemingly phantom organization with no visible financial backing intend to pay salaries to its reporters and editors?

The thing that’s both scary and thought provoking is that whoever is behind USAVoice.org advertised in many cities simultaneously — and there has to be some serious money involved, given that advertising on the likes of Careerbuilder, HotJobs and Monster doesn’t come cheap. If this were really just satire like The Onion or farce like Candid Camera and its many imitators, nobody would have spent that kind of money on the online job listings; so clearly, somebody thought there would be profit of one sort or another. So what’s the source? Once again, Deep Throat’s advice appears prudent: follow the money.

A listing of most of the cities in which the ads ran is available on Indeed.com at:
http://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=Editor&as_ettl=Entry+Level+Reporter&start=20

The Indeed.com links lead, however, to the hotjobs.yahoo.com site, wherein we find what is possibly the most (yet not very) complete profile of the company — which, according to that information, is allegedly based in Las Vegas and supposedly has a mere 25 employees, none of whom are named. Neither are the executives, nor any contacts whatsoever, let alone an address or phone number. The company’s profile on HotJobs is an almost word-for-word copy of the organization’s promotional text on its own site:

http://hotjobs.yahoo.com/Company-Profiles/U/USA-Voice_55422

Please note: HotJobs listed 1,200 positions advertised for USAVoice, the earliest of them posted on June 28, 2006 — and the outfit was still posting jobs in different cities as of July 12, 2006. In other words, they were still advertising on HotJobs, even though their ads have been pulled from Careerbuilder and other sites. How many more hopeful writers and editors were drawn in by this? And what’s going to happen to the personal information they submitted? Interestingly, all those listings had been pulled by July 28, which could indicate either that the positions had been filled or that the company simply didn’t need to run those ads anymore for other reasons. At this writing, we don’t know which is the case. Yet a visit to Indeed.com that same day showed many listings that appeared to be current as of the day before, including the following:

Entry Level Reporter
USA Voice - Augusta, GA
usavoice.org/Careers Once we receive your application
we will have our local Editor contact you for an interview.
ONLY APPLICATIONS THROUGH THE WEBSITE LISTED...
From HotJobs - 1 day 6 hours ago

I’m not surprised to learn that the firm is supposedly based in Las Vegas, given my own research when I first saw the ad on Careerbuilder: when I went to the company’s web site, I noticed in the upper right-hand corner a box from AccuWeather.com giving the current temperature for Las Vegas. How appropriate, I thought, given that the only contact names I had at that point were also the names of porn stars (see explanation below). Only in Las Vegas would someone think that was either funny or appropriate — and what an appropriate town in which to originate a scam. However, when I tried to use search engines and directory services to locate a phone number or address for USAVoice in the Las Vegas area, I came up with nothing.

In the Chicago-area ads, the name Heather Hunter was used for the contact person; in the initial replies to applicants, the name of sender given was Kyle Stone. Both are names of porn stars, as one discovers by using search engines such as Google or Dogpile.com. With USAVoice being so elusive but having a home base in Las Vegas, one immediately wonders if some money laundering is going on, by either mob sources, drug cartels, political or religious fringe groups, or some part of the porn industry. Speculation isn’t proof, of course, but there are just too many questions here with no answers for one not to wonder about the money source. Especially with those contact names — it’s just too weird a coincidence.

The other name that comes up on letters in other markets (including some ‘cold-call’ solicitation letters to young writers, students, and other who have their resumes posted online at sites like Monster.com, inviting them to apply for reporting or marketing jobs) is Klaas de Vries — which is the name of, depending on the context, either a Dutch composer, a Dutch politician, or a Dutch con artist/wanna-be artists’ rep for entertainment clients, possibly working out of Africa or Europe.

Other sites note that the registrant for the USAVoice.org web site seems to be in Herndon, VA; but that, too, could have easily been faked. Moreover, there’s no solid information on the listed registrants, either. A simple whois.com search likewise produced nothing useful.

Klaas de Vries (or someone claiming to be him) shows up June 28th on a discussion thread on SportsJournalists.com, which seems to have the most substantial information about this elusive organization (if, indeed, it IS an organization and not a one-man front for who knows what):

http://www.sportsjournalists.com/forum/index.php/topic,28181.0.html

In this exchange, the participant claiming to be de Vries also claims to work for USAVoice but offers no details or facts about the organization; he also claims to be an “internationally recognized investigative reporter” but offers no substantiation of that, either (in fact, he asserts that “A simple Google search will confirm my standing,” whereas all that a search on either Google or Dogpile produces are links to sites that mention de Vries in connection to frauds or scams or his allegations of such regarding others, not to any media outlets whatsoever). Moreover, there is no evidence so far that anyone named Klaas de Vries works or has worked for any legitimate news organization. Is his involvement with USAVoice.org — an outfit that says it’s looking for “fresh and edgy voices, not reporters who have been through the ‘establishment’ news organizations” — perhaps a sign of journalism envy?

More questions than answers appear on a discussion thread at Mediabistro, a community, industry news, and jobs site for all segments of the media industry:

http://www.mediabistro.com/bbs/cache/t27432_1.asp

and at MediaLine, a site for journalists in the TV business:

http://www.medialine.com/ubb/NonCGI/ultimatebb.php?ubb=get_topic;f=1;t=049064

One interesting discussion thread elsewhere raises the question of whether de Vries is also an extortionist by way of making unsubstantiated allegations of fraud against others that end up with no known victims. But it also results in de Vries and one of his apparently favorite targets, one Alec Defrawy, taking long-winded, meaningless potshots at one another online; and the more one reads of this, the more questionable and irritating it gets for readers:

http://www.scam.com/showthread.php?t=9289

At least one site, Scam-o-rama, lists de Vries’s site under “Funny Links,” apparently considering his site to be more ludicrous or spoof-like than fraudulent:

http://www.scamorama.com/

There are even sites wherein someone claiming to be de Vries insists that someone else has been impersonating him in various posts on different sites (again, no substantiation is offered). The sheer frequency of this dubious debate between de Vries and his possibly fictional ‘evil’ alter ego on a number of different sites over at least two years’ time tells one right away that something stinks here, and neither claimant — if indeed they are two different people and not a single, pathological scammer — is to be trusted. Additional sites mentioning either de Vries by name or the USAVoice.org hiring scam are:

Scam Fraud Alert
http://www.scamfraudalert.com/showthread.php?t=1873

Scam.com
http://www.scam.com/archive/index.php/f-10 and http://www.scam.com/archive/index.php/t-13849

Rip-Off Report
http://www.ripoffreport.com/reports/ripoff146732.htm

what seems to be de Vries’s own site, but who knows?
http://www.klaasdevriesjr.nl/k-files/talentrock/usa_voice_usavoice_org.htm
http://www.klaasdevriesjr.nl/k-files/talentrock/alec_defrawy_difrawi_defrawi_phishing_scam.htm
http://www.klaasdevriesjr.nl/

Now I ask you: what kind of news organization would hire a guy with such a seemingly dicey background, or without at least vetting his credentials? As newbies on the block, the folks at USAVoice have no reputation yet and can’t afford to lose any credibility this early in the game.

The latest notice on USAVoice’s home page touts that they’ll be premiering on July 31st; the opening date has already been pushed back once. I guess we’ll all see on the 31st whether this venture is real or not — but even if it’s up and running by then, I, for one, will still have questions about whether the operators are legitimate.

You know that old Chicago saying: if your mother says she loves you, check it out.* And I highly recommend that anyone hoping to work for USAVoice does exactly that.

*City News Bureau, rest in peace: your motto survives you, and we miss you terribly in this town.

2006-04-21T18:40:00.001-05:00

On literature and first glances
posted 4-21-2006

Now that spring has shown and the saps are flowing (who, me — slam lovesick swains? Na-a-a-ahh.), it’s time to reconsider dating. Having recovered from Seasonal Affective Disorder and crawled out from under my overburdened life like a chipmunk emerging from hibernation, I’ve been scouting out flirty little flouncy dresses and pastel pumps with which to bewitch, replenishing my make-up, and trying new scents with abandon, like a good little girl answering Nature’s call.

But my brain, as usual, has taken a step back from both this and reading the newspapers, trolling for something succulent to write about, and rethought what it really means to be dating. Or, for that matter, writing while dating (it is an unseemly fact that writers, being well able to pen glorious love letters themselves, vainly hope to receive same from the various targets of their affections; and this almost never happens, disgustingly).

When of all things, the movie channels on cable intervened, drawing me to an inescapable conclusion:

I am jealous — of both people who have someone appreciative to whom they can write magnificent love letters, and those who receive such. The cool, perfect, sunlit day today merely intensifies this.

Damn the French! They know how to write belles lettres when it suits them. I turned on the weather channel to get the forecast for this afternoon, channel surfed for a few seconds, and stopped at Gerard Depardieu playing Cyrano de Bergerac. Of course I’ve seen this version before, but not lately. A good one. Roxane is just reading Christian’s first note penned by Cyrano. And he writes: if words were kisses, you could read my letter with your lips … Damn, what woman wouldn’t swoon, at least for a few seconds, upon receiving words like that? What woman wouldn’t want to receive them, at least once?? And they survive translation well. Unfortunate that the prancing pup is so unworthy a beneficiary of the poet’s work; but there is no other outlet for Cyrano, knowing that Roxane sees only beauty and mistakes it for merit. And because she will not ‘see’ her cousin any further than his remarkable nose, despite her fraternal feelings for him, her absence of either wisdom or insight damns all three of them.

Merde! But this is a costly ruse
To ghost for someone so obtuse …

My words, not Cyrano’s; but it will cost him, and we already know it ends badly. Christian is a poseur and a fool. Roxane discovers her cousin’s authorship only as he lay dying. Too late, you twit. Cyrano the Gascon spends his life writing, fighting, and dying slowly inside, even while living larger than life, and dies without the love of the woman he’s treasured, having wasted his time ‘subbing for a lesser man to make her happy in what way he can’: giving her the man she thinks she wants. Someone else.

I am reminded by Roxane and Christian of something else I reread lately, something each of us knows in his heart but conveniently forgets once the hormones start flowing: chemistry between people is not an infallible guide to human happiness or compatibility — it is rather nature’s plotting writ large, a ruse to get two biologically compatible people (in terms of genetics, nothing more) to make good babies for the propogation of the species. It has nothing to do with romantic, emotional, or intellectual compatibility, let alone happiness, because Nature the blind watchmaker DOESN’T CARE about the welfare or happiness of individuals: Nature only cares about the survival of the species. As long as that happens and biologically compatible individuals keep making babies, Nature doesn’t give a damn whether all of us remain terminally UNhappy. Just as long as we keep on screwing.

Only human beings can thwart this and act for their own happiness. Only human beings, capable of self-awareness, forethought, sufficient reasoning, are capable of co-opting Nature’s purposes for their own. Which means, in the end, that we have the ability to overcome our outdated instinctual programming and readjust our behavior to keep on surviving in the face of changed conditions like, say, the presence of 6-plus billion people on the planet straining at available resources, or a world that could easily end in nuclear holocaust, and say ‘enough is enough — no more indiscriminate baby-making; we’ll concentrate on happier human relationships instead, because that has more survival value right now.’

Yet who besides me thinks about this when it comes to dating?? Everybody’s still hung up on the 'instant chemistry' thing, blindly letting Nature lead them around by their dicks and twats without realizing that you can have incredible up-front chemistry with a person who is horribly psychologically and emotionally BAD for you. Most of us have had that kind of run-in at least once in our lives. Thank heavens mine’s long over, although it was hard to persuade myself of it at the time. Hormones are powerfully resistant to reason, it seems, especially when the man’s handsome.

Instant chemistry is overrated. I like chemistry as much as the next person, and sex probably more than most; but I’ll wait to get to know a person to see if there’s any intellectual/emotional chemistry, thank you, before my clothes come off — and that takes more than three dates, folks. Figure an average of 3 to 4 hours per date, and you’ve known that person, what, maybe 12 hours? Half a day, in actual fact?? This is supposed to be a reasonable time period before stripping and grappling in the dark?

Is it any wonder so many people are disappointed by and have such low expectations of the first time they get laid by a new romantic interest? Or that such occasions can become so emotionally ‘loaded’ in the absence of knowing enough actual facts about each other? A good romp in the hay after such cursory acquaintance (pure chance, that) suddenly takes on enormously disproportionate, illusory importance as a result, seeming far more significant than it really is. One begins to understand why really good supposed one-night stands are so hard to let go of when both of you knew in advance the interlude was supposed to be a short, quick one without any ties or expectations (that is, of course, why they don't really work and should be avoided; that, and the public health risks).

It is part of human nature, however, to have hopes and expectations — which, it turns out, in the absence of facts one might know about the other person therefore take on so much greater symbolic importance than they should. And the hormones are right there, egging you on to do exactly that and turn off your reason. Nature is interested in survival in general, not yours in particular, psychological or otherwise; your survival in particular comes from understanding Nature’s agenda and either using it, circumventing it, or bending it to your own will. And this you can only do with Nature’s other gift to you: reason. You use reason and your own personal survival instinct to overcome the biological imperative and make it your tool, not your puppetmaster, and you just might have a chance of acting for your own happiness.

Had Roxane known this, Cyrano would have had a longer, happier life with his cousin, Christian would have died quickly in battle and never passed on his blindly, adolescently stupid genes, and Roxane would have had less beautiful, possibly big-nosed babies — but ones that could write like the devil and charm to make their way in the world, blessed with an abundance of wit. Who might have even grown up to counsel (or perhaps outthink and outcompete) Cardinal Richielieu and his ilk. And French literature would be short one more masterful but depressing story.

Sunday the 23rd is Shakespeare’s birthday. I really prefer his work to that of the French; yet even in his plays, his heroines had to settle for generally lesser men, as bardologist Harold Bloom so aptly observed. But it’s in Shakespeare’s poetry that we find length and breadth of ardor, its sorrows and joys, succinctly framed — so I will find time on his birthday, as I usually do, to sit under a tree in the warm spring sunlight and reread the sonnets. And remind myself of how lucky we are when we find someone worthy of receiving such sentiments, and renew the hope that this may yet happen to me as well.

My pen itches for the opportunity.

2006-03-16T17:15:00.000-06:00

Snark Bytes

3-16-2006
What's Better? His Empty Suit or Her Baggage?
By MAUREEN DOWD
The Democrats should not dismiss a politically less experienced but personally more charismatic presidential prospect.

Q.: His Empty Suit or Her Baggage?
A.: Maybe neither. But that doesn't mean Hillary shouldn't run. And anybody else willing to take some risk by taking on Dubya.

So MoDo basically thinks Barack Obama’s charisma may yet be a saving grace, along with his sense of humor, despite his presence in the Senate being nearly devoid of meaningful content or action. The problem here is that Obama has kept his profile so low, his nose so clean, and he’s taken so few (any??) risks that we have no idea what he really stands for or what he could do (see cover story in this month's Chicago mag for a revealing slice of Not Much about Obama). And Hillary's not taking any risks, either, just when somebody should.

Dowd is dreaming — or more like wishfully thinking. Obama is basically a pretty, promising, but empty suit filled with charisma and potential but nothing you can actually sink your teeth into. There’s no evidence to support her assertions about Obama’s chances, and none to indicate he’s going to take any useful (for us, not necessarily for him) political risks soon, either. Not yet, anyway. If the man can’t call the White House to account now, when it’s relatively safe to jump on the administration and particularly during an election year, what’s he waiting for? Why is Russ Feingold still the only liberal besides Ted Kennedy who's willing to stick his neck out and actually say/do something useful? (Ted really needs to 1) retire before he drops dead and 2) hand over the mantle soon to someone else equally effective in the Senate, but there's nobody who could take it on besides Feingold. Obama apparently neither wants to, nor can.) Like the call for censure: how much openly mercenary, mendacious, unconscionable crap must we tolerate and how many lies disproved by 9/11 commissions does Shrub have to tell before we — and/or the Democrats — hold him accountable for something?

I'm for having more Russ Feingolds, thanks, and fewer Obamas. Oh, and maybe a few more George Clooneys. And how desperate do we have to be politically for me to say THAT? Let's face it, I'm glad Liberal George says/does what he does and says/does it on principle; long may he continue to be earnest, principled and serious. Somebody has to be, and it even looks good on him. But I really wish he'd stop dating those silly supermodels who couldn't care less about the First Amendment and invite me to his villa on Lake Como instead (at least I could hold up my end of the conversation ... and perhaps a few other things).

Come on , Georgie, ‘fess up — you’ve always liked the smart girls better: all the research shows we’re more fun and better in the bedroom, too. Of course, I understand perfectly if you prefer to check out this bit of social research personally; heaven knows I’ve always thought research an excellent idea, and Policywonk here would be happy to (ahem!) help you with yours …

3-10-2006
MediaMatters.org: Coulter on the issue of AIDS: Hollywood "got caught with its pants down" and "got it right in the end"
In her March 8 syndicated column, right-wing pundit Ann Coulter wrote that Hollywood "got caught with its pants down" on the issue of AIDS and "got it right in the end."

Dear me; Ann Coulter, conservative twit, shrill and clueless still. Just a little post-Oscar-night hissy-fit that reeks of sour grapes (as in, who on earth would invite her?). Never mind that the AIDS ribbon, on which she hangs so much importance (since when, anyway?), wasn't even created until 1991, as Wonkette snarkily pointed out this morning (that, and the fact that Coulter continues to starve herself to emulate the celebrity standard of beauty, even as she swipes repeatedly at Tinseltown without seeing any contradiction there; nice touch, Ann!) ... but then, when one is as clueless as Coulter and bases an entire reputation on that (blindly, in her case), perhaps one doesn't feel the need to research, let alone mention, relevant facts. Or think, for that matter, instead of just jerk knees. Please: somebody tell me quick how I, too, can get paid big bucks for being that stupid in public (not! Unlike Coulter, I DO have some self-respect left, albeit no money ... ).

I'd say Coulter gives new meaning to that discriminatory term Dumb Blonde, but I'll bet almost anything that she was brunette as a child, unlike some of us. I'm also betting she's probably saving a gratuitous swipe at Dana Reeve for tomorrow, just to see how low she can go.

2006-03-07T04:28:00.003-06:00

Civil unions: Just do it, and move on

Now that gay couples can legally marry in Massachusetts and various pro and con measures on gay unions are wending their way through other states’ courts and legislatures, minority opposition will stridently increase. Even though there are many more important things to discuss, the ultra-vocal ultra-conservatives will hang their hats on this issue and on abortion. The ill-advised blathering and grandstanding of Alan Keyes is merely one example. This shrill minority will insist to others that recognizing civil unions is somehow grossly, intrinsically wrong and that the concept would be irrelevant if not for those pesky gay activists who get so much play in the media. They’re wrong. This conversation has been coming for a long time.

From the moment American women first gained widespread access to reliable birth control, a discussion about gay marriage was inevitable. Don’t see the connection? Let me back up a bit.

The moment American women began to take charge of their reproductive lives, they began to take charge of the rest of their lives as well. A social revolution regarding the role of women in society has been happening ever since. There’s no putting that genie back in the bottle, thank heavens: this is a change that, all in all, very few women regret. In the process, women demonstrated and society came to openly recognize something that married and unmarried heterosexual couples have long known: that there are very good reasons besides procreation for sex within a relationship.

Sex is part of the glue that helps to keep romantic partnerships, including marriages, together. If this wasn’t blindingly obvious before birth control pills appeared about 35 years ago, it is now. Given that, the government would be foolish to argue otherwise.

Meanwhile, there is a corollary: perhaps having children is not the only — or even primary — reason for getting married these days. Sure, creating a family might be a reason for marrying, but that family need not include children. That is, it need not include anyone but the two spouses. After all, there are plenty of women past childbearing age who still find reasons to marry, as do women who can’t have children and women who choose not to have them. Same goes for men: to some, maybe kids aren’t the point. And on a planet with more than six billion people straining its resources, the choice of marriage without kids has to be given at least some reasonable consideration.

Marriage today is about two people making a public, legally recognized statement about a very personal, loving relationship that is rooted in loyalty and exclusivity: we’re in this together, folks, and everyone else please butt out. Children may or may not result, but they’re clearly not obligatory. What is this public act and the legal recognition attached to it supposed to give the two people involved? Emotional, psychological, and, sometimes, financial security. Legal protection. One very special person whom the other can lean on, each in his or her turn, when times get tough. A safe haven against the madness and confusion of the world. Someone to grow roots with. Most important, a relationship in which both people can thrive, not just survive, if they put their minds and hearts to it. In short, family.

It is in society’s best interest to help preserve such stable relationships. The often harsh realities of modern life assault us from all sides. We change jobs more often than we used to, even careers. Wages have stagnated for three decades in many fields while costs have increased, and our incomes — if we have any these days — are no longer worth what they were. Higher education and literacy are no longer guarantees of employment. We move more often, sometimes cross-country, uprooting ourselves and our immediate families and truncating in the process nearly all other relationships.

There is more to know, more to learn, and a greater amount that is known than ever before, and the rate of change is accelerating everywhere in too many aspects of our lives. We exist in an era of terrorism and have lived for more than half a century in the shadow of the nuclear dilemma. All it would take is a few bombs exploded at the right time, in the right place, at the right height in the atmosphere for the fallout to go worldwide and imperil the earth itself. We don’t even need bombs — we could poison the earth for centuries with nuclear waste or chemical threats alone. Frankly, we have one hell of a lot more stress than we used to, less time to cope with it, and no chance that it will go away any time soon.

And what helps human beings survive this monumental stress, this staggering rate of change? What reminds us that there are good reasons for being and staying alive, for maintaining that social glue among us? Our relationships, particularly the most intimate ones. They remind us of what is most redeeming about our humanity: our capacity for love, for wisdom, for justice, for mercy. Our ability to better ourselves and the world in which we live, for our own sakes and for those to come after us. Our adaptiveness and resilience under duress. Our ability to reason, to learn from our mistakes, and to change in response to what we have learned. These are essential to our survival, for the great reality of the universe is change.

Society has another area of interest that involves self-preservation: public health. We have been visited by AIDS and HIV for more than 20 years now, and we are no closer to curing it than we were when it first appeared. AIDS is and always has been a mostly heterosexual phenomenon in Africa, the continent of its origin, and is so now virtually everywhere else. That it affected homosexuals first in North America was a fluke of circumstance. Any society that wants to survive has powerful reasons to try to reduce the spread of AIDS and other perils like it.

Abstinence is a nice idea, but, as with other sexually transmitted diseases before AIDS, not bloody likely on a large scale. Nature has been at her tricks millions of years longer than humans have exercised free will, and the biological imperative toward sex is damnably strong. Consider this: if even one entire generation had been able to keep its collective pants zipped, we would have eradicated syphilis, gonorrhea, and genital herpes a long time ago. No such luck. Thus, the more realistic emphasis on safe sex. That’s not foolproof, however, and so that strategy must be coupled (no pun intended) with another: encouraging stable, monogamous romantic relationships in the hope that these will greatly reduce the rate of infection with AIDS and other potentially lethal microbes.

Of course, one of the human communities most damaged by AIDS is the homosexual population. And here is a very relevant point: if you want to know what the ultimate example of testosterone-driven biological imperative looks like, consider the rampant promiscuity of young gay males. It’s not only been culturally accepted over the years within that subgroup that these young men will have a high number of sexual encounters, many of which will be about sex for its own sake with strangers, it’s expected and even celebrated. This even now, despite the fact that such practice could easily be a death sentence. Post-AIDS this should have changed, but it hasn't changed enough: there are still people who, remarkably, refuse to practice safe sex. The only cultural counterforce to such indiscriminate, stupidly dangerous promiscuity is the existence, proliferation, and support of monogamous, stable, committed relationships among gays. Society has a public health survival interest in recognizing and encouraging such long-term partnerships.

Add the public health argument to the other reasons, and opposing legally recognized gay unions becomes infantile, absurd, and irresponsible. Not enough that some virus or bacterium may be at the top of the food chain instead of us — we also have to shoot ourselves in the groin, as it were.

And don’t even mention religious prohibitions against homosexuality. The state has no business deciding and is in no position to decide which faith, if any, has the correct take on this. Besides, that’s irrelevant to civil law, and dangerous. Throughout human history and prehistory, religion has been used to preserve the status quo and protect the despotic few at the expense of the many. It seems like only yesterday that religion justified slavery, wars of aggression, caste systems, feudalism, polygamy, imperialism, the selling of child brides into unwilling marriages, bigotry, genocide — the list goes on. Today, a few flavors of religion attempt to justify suicide bombings and other terrorism, all in the name of beliefs that are simply unprovable. Do we really need to say more?

If the term gay marriage is too inflammatory for you, fine — don’t use it. Call them civil unions, or domestic partnerships, or whatever else you want, so long as they are recognized under the law and give the participants legal rights equal to those recognized for heterosexual married couples and common-law marriages. Long-term relationships of all kinds have survival value to the human race. It’s time to recognize that and move on to other things. Like surviving the nuclear age, globalization, outsourcing, world-wide terrorism, and itty-bitty microbes that just could kill us all. Oh, and while we’re at it, could somebody please keep an eye out for that rogue asteroid that might be headed our way? I, for one, have my hands full with too many other things and not enough time to deal with them all anyway ...

2006-02-25T22:49:00.002-06:00

Hey, neighbor: you owe me a vote!

Sent Sept. 22, 2004; revised Feb. 24, 2006

With another interim election imminent — and the last two elections apparently having been stolen, then the stealing of the first legitimized by the U.S. Supreme Court — op-ed discussion turns inevitably to the subjects of voting fraud and of the nation’s lousy record of voter participation and what can be done to increase it. I won’t repeat here the humiliating statistics about what a puny, inadequate percentage of those who can register to vote do so, or what even more embarrassing percentage of those registered actually show up to vote. Others will be regurgitating those stats shortly, in another attempt to goad the general public into voting this time.

Here’s my problem with most of the discussion about increasing voter participation: it seems to dwell more on exhortation based on either 1) shaming people into voting and/or appealing to their self-interest or 2) focusing on successful strategies to deliver people to the polls on election day — without talking about something more basic, like what citizenship requires. And it never occurs to nonvoters that they owe me, their fellow citizen, much beyond not disturbing the peace, let alone their participation in our democratic government. Time to change that.

All this talk about what government can do for you is great — young voters in particular need to know the many ways in which they benefit from self-governance in general and specific laws and programs. The ultraconservatives are very adept at haranguing their supporters about what they’ll lose if, say, anyone who can think beyond ideology and theology gets elected to public office. The independents, liberals, and progressives are not so adept at getting a turnout. So it makes sense to appeal to those who don’t vote by telling them how government affects them and their specific interests, chapter and verse, in order to get them motivated on election day. In fact, I encourage it — but we can’t stop there. That’s merely one part of a combination strategy, if the strategy is to work at all. Besides, such pandering smacks too much of what lobbyists and special interests do. Getting voters to the polls is not a special interest issue: it’s a self-governance issue basic to all citizens.

Here’s the rub: there’s nothing wrong with self-interest except defining it too narrowly. And we usually don’t define it broadly enough, especially when it comes to discussing voting and self-governance. More to the point, self-interest shouldn’t be the defining reason why people need to vote and keep themselves well informed enough to vote intelligently. Maybe, just maybe, what they owe to their neighbors and community should count a bit more — precisely because self-governance and democracy have survival value for us all. Besides, I’m tired of my nonvoting fellow citizens behaving as if they live like hermits on an island, enjoying the benefits of a free society in which I participate but without giving anything back to me.

It’s this idea of giving back precisely because you enjoy so great a benefit that is such a great motivator — as John F. Kennedy well knew when he said, “Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country” and then proceeded to invent the Peace Corps. People want to be inspired, not goaded or guilted or plea-bargained or even bribed into doing the right thing. But even when you start by inspiring people to be responsible, there’s still an unwritten structure to what’s going on in the society — and that underlying structure is best openly addressed as you form your strategies to get the vote out.

In every discussion about the roles of a society and its individual members, there is a common thread. In debates over social order, ethics, personal values, the rights of man, the conduct of government, public policy, the common good, or what it means to live a just life, there is an organizing force, a tension among four basic factors that underlie each such discussion. They are:

1) what individuals owe to themselves, that they may survive and thrive;
2) what individuals owe to the community or society in which they live;
3) what the community or society owes to its individual members; and
4) what the community or society owes to itself for its own survival and security.

These four factors are inescapable. Whether or not we choose to frame our discussion of public matters in deference to them, these are the fulcrum upon which the discussion turns. They direct and influence the outcome. They underlie the rules and the principles by which we live. And in discussing such issues, what we really debate is the interplay of these four imperatives — their relative importance, the extent to which they overlap, and where the lines are to be drawn among them.

The overlap, the tension among those four factors is highly important. It doesn't matter whether the immediate issue is voter participation, private morality, public welfare, national defense, education, land use, natural resources, health care reform, or disturbing the peace. It always comes down to where the lines are drawn, to who decides and how we decide. Those lines aren’t fixed, either: they bend, flex and move depending on circumstances and events. The horror of September 11 and its aftermath, for example, made them move a lot — and if you don’t vote, you don’t get any say about how that gets determined.

Letting others decide where the lines are drawn for you by default because you won’t vote affects not only you but everyone else who lives here. Even when you refuse to decide, to choose, you bear responsibility for your refusal and its effects — and whether you like it or not, you’re answerable to people like me, the ones who have to live here, too. That’s what it means to be part of a self-governing community. It isn’t just that the government owes you or you owe the government anything (like taxes). You owe your fellow citizens your interest, your voice, your participation, because none of us can do much alone. I’d love to fire the guy in the White House, for example, but I can’t do it by myself: others have to back me up by showing up at the polls.

Paradoxically, although I can’t do it alone, every individual vote matters, as the actual votes in Florida as recounted after the fact last time demonstrate. Had Al Gore insisted on a total state recount, he would have won, plain and simple — and the Supremes wouldn’t have handed Dubya the presidency on a silver platter, because the matter never would have reached that court. And we probably wouldn’t be in Iraq right now, and the national debt wouldn’t be more than double what it was when Reagan left office (which was way too high as it was), and so on. A whole slew of dominoes wouldn’t have fallen.

The great thinker Hillel alluded to the inseparability of the four factors and the enduring tension between them when he argued that individual welfare must not be defined too narrowly and that self-interest overcomes selfishness when it expands to include the welfare of others.

"If I am not for myself," Hillel reasoned, "who will be for me? But if I am only for myself, what am I? … And if not now, when?" Hillel's point was that in acting for others, we preserve our own rights and welfare. He was not alone in arguing it, and it is upon this idea that our own Constitution and Bill of Rights are based: we allow to all others what we would allow ourselves, lest we, too, lose our liberties.

In the best of worlds, public discussion of issues is based on principled argument rationally presented and conducted by well-informed, conscientious citizens. In the best of worlds, we start with general principles and dispute their application to specific cases. That is often precisely what makes decisions reached in this manner so enduring.

In the real world, however, discussion often is not logically structured or rationally argued, with little or no thought given to any principles on which arguments might be based. Individual citizens may not only be uninformed but may not feel any compelling need to be well informed — let alone feel embarrassed or guilty that they lack such responsibility, to themselves or to others.

In the real world, people often argue out of ignorance or fear. They ‘vent’ before they think and are increasingly encouraged to do so by others — from talk show hosts and so-called ‘reality’ shows to special interests, to self-styled populists and demagogues — as if informing oneself were unnecessary and speaking only from one's own limited experience were not only sufficient but valid and laudable. And they expect one to sympathize, if not applaud such ignorance.

And here’s a highly relevant but overlooked point: when we talk about what an individual owes to his community or society, that doesn’t just mean to the overarching entity or the government, though people often stop right there with that notion and don’t think further. What we really mean is not just the community as a whole or government, but the individuals that make it up — meaning, your neighbors. Fellow citizens in another state. Me, for example. And when you owe me and don’t discharge your responsibility to me, you can fully expect me to tell you about it. And I should.

Which is what I’m doing here. I expect you to do better, guys. I expect you to inform yourselves and go vote. Because you live here and are eligible to vote, those of you who are eligible owe me that, even if it isn’t (and shouldn’t be) enforceable by law. Particularly as it isn’t enforceable by law, only by conscience.

Worried that your vote won’t count, especially given the last election? It's a legitimate concern, but you can do something about that, too. Here’s your laundry list:

1 — Get yourself informed enough to vote sensibly and think before you vote. Don’t be ignorant, or you’ve wasted your vote, or worse, handed a vote to your own political opponents (and, possibly, the enemies of your own civil rights) and screwed us all. There are more than enough resources out there, like those on Yahoo News, for example, that will tell you about your elected officials, what legislation they've proposed or sponsored, how they've voted, and when they’ve shown up to vote on legislation, etc. Read, read, read, and use multiple sources, preferably independent ones (and yes, make it your business to find out who’s behind each source you read; you should know, for example, if the Rev. Moon or Rupert Murdoch or some other person or entity that can or does slant the news owns that source).

2 — Register to vote, then show up on election day.

3 — Join an organization like the League of Women Voters or MoveOn.org or Rock the Vote and register others, then organize to get other voters to the polls on election day, even if you have to volunteer to be a van driver.

4 — Worried about someone stealing the vote? Join a group of poll-watchers and be an observer on election day — but months before that, find out what mechanisms, paper or electronic ballots, are used for voting in your area and what back-ups, protections, legal remedies, etc., are provided, if any. If those means are particularly subject to foul play, errors, difficulty of use, and/or confusion, organize and lobby local government to change the mechanism used in time for the next election and publicize your efforts. Change is more likely to happen when the demand for it gets a public spotlight in the media and dogged follow-up from both you and the press.

5 — Let others know what you’re doing and get them involved, too. When you hear someone say he or she has never voted and doesn’t see the point, challenge that immediately — and do it every time, with every apathetic potential voter you meet. You never know when one of your arguments just might persuade friend, colleague, or stranger to do the right thing.

And while you’re at it, remind those persons that they owe me, too, not just you — and that I’ll be looking for an explanation from them when they fail to do the right thing (that’s one of the perks of writing op-ed: you get that bully pulpit to ask so many of your neighbors why they haven’t done what they should). Being challenged by our fellow citizens to do better is what any of us in a democracy can and should expect when there’s so much riding on our common welfare and on our future.

2006-02-24T20:11:00.002-06:00

Bill Frist, intellectual embarrassment, needs a wake-up call

Sent August 20, 2005

Sen. Bill Frist, Senate majority leader, deserves a smack upside the head with a college biology text. Either he never took a course in evolutionary biology, wasn’t paying attention when it was taught, or has forgotten anything he ever knew about it. Whichever of these three is the reason, any one of them renders him an embarrassment — to the scientifically literate and to the electorate. Mind you, physicians aren’t automatically scientists, although they’d like to think they are; but the ones who don’t do real research (and Frist, a surgeon, is among them) aren’t steeped in scientific method. Perhaps that underlies his latest lapse in judgment: he now touts the ridiculous notion that so-called “intelligent design” should be taught in schools alongside the rather well-documented theory of evolution, as if they were somehow equivalent in scientific value. They are not.

Far from it: evolution has years upon accumulated years of evidence behind it, evidence that has been tested, peer reviewed, and published. The research that has produced that evidence can be readily duplicated, and has been time and again. Intelligent design, on the other hand, is a seemingly reasonable sounding cover for creationism, which is not a scientific theory in any sense of that phrase but a mere assertion, a religious claim — and like so many religious assertions, it and its proponents suffer from the conceit that they don’t actually have to produce any evidence for their assertion in order for it to be taken seriously. Real chutzpah, that.

They’re wrong: science isn’t like missionary work — faith alone is meaningless. You have to produce actual data or other evidence to be taken seriously in science. So of course the creationists must produce some before they can expect those who enact public policy to listen — but, sadly for them, there is no evidence whatsoever supporting creationism/intelligent design, merely circular arguments repeated endlessly in the hopes that the repetition will, in time, wear down those demanding actual proof. Not bloody likely. But then, the proponents of creationism/intelligent design don’t even bother with logic, let alone proof: what they hope is to sway people whose own knowledge of biology is weak or nonexistent through emotional arguments (given that they have no evidence to support their claim, emotional sway is the only available resort).

The appropriate place for teaching creationism/intelligent design (if one can actually consider teaching a mere notion appropriate in the first place) is in Sunday school during religious instruction. That’s it — nowhere else. Unless and until there is solid, extensive, well-documented, repeatable research that produces solid evidence in favor of intelligent design — evidence at least as solid as, say, that in support of evolution — even suggesting the mention of creationism/intelligent design in any grade school or high school classroom in the U.S. is in and of itself inappropriate, irrational, and unjustifiable.

Given this, why are those who set public policy or legislate (like Frist) bothering to listen to creationists regarding intelligent design? Because elected officials are more interested in the ballot box than in proof — and they think they’re better off paying attention to those who don’t have and don’t require proof of intelligent design so long as those forces represent a significant presence at the polls. Politicians and policymakers who believe this are not only wrong but also have the wrong priorities: they have a duty to our society as a whole, present and future, not to vocal, pushy religious minorities or even to religious majorities. And they can find the correct principle within the First Amendment’s disestablishment clause — the one that says government may not favor any cult or creed, and thus church and state must remain forever separate.

The bottom line here is that people of faith are free to believe whatever they wish to believe, but their rights end where the rights of others begin — which means that none may impose their religious views on anyone else or enact those religious views into civil law in any way whatsoever, at our expense. Making public schools teach creationism/intelligent design is doing exactly that — and as such is automatically unreasonable, unconstitutional, and unforgiveable.

Sen. Frist ought to know better. In fact, he probably does: he just thinks there’s some future advantage at the ballot box for him to giving grave injury to the constitution, civil liberties for the rest of us be damned. Which is what really clinches that smack upside the head: it just might shake his brains (and whatever good sense he has left) back into place.

2006-02-24T19:55:00.001-06:00

‘Going Postal’ with a twist, part 2

Sent on July 26, 2005

We know their names now: Mohammed Sidique Khan, Hasib Hussain, Shahzad Tanweer, and the mysterious Jamaican, Germaine Lindsay. They were the London bombers of 7/7. We don’t know their individual motivations for suicide-bombing, nor who recruited them for it.

The information that has trickled in about them to date hasn’t brought much clarity so far. Their families are bewildered; the two young wives never suspected. People who knew the three from Leeds say they were nice boys, and were liked. No one realized they’d become Islamic extremists, let alone that they had it in them to kill innocent civilians.

And the more we learn about them, the more puzzled we are by the details. On the surface, at least, they seemed to have little reason for personal alienation. The bombers weren’t children of poor families but of hard-working, moderately prosperous ones. They didn’t want for much, materially speaking; one of the three Leeds men was known for cruising around in his dad’s Mercedes. Two, Tanweer and Hussain, were in university before they left for Pakistan, though they weren’t the best of students and Tanweer was known then as a goof-off. Their respective parents let them go to Pakistan hoping that they would learn some discipline abroad. Hussain, at least, seemed to have upon his return; he did well thereafter in his business school curriculum, making his abandonment of a potential career all the more strange.

For his part, Khan was both well liked and conscientious in his work with young children. He might have started at the bottom of the educational system, but many do, and there was promise for him there. Moreover, his wife (now widow) is pregnant with their second child. The shadowy Lindsay, of whom we still know the least, also had a wife and child. What could be more important to these men than their children?

Actually, it’s a story we’ve heard before, though not in this context. Think about it: remove the religious and political backdrop, and who do they remind you of? Who else did no one suspect until the killing was over? Who shocked their families and community with the vehemence of their attack? Try the Columbine shooters.

They were the sons of moderately well-off parents, those Colorado boys, products of a good suburban school system. They had nearly everything that normal modern teenagers could reasonably want. Unlike adults who ‘go postal’ and start killing those around them, those teens hadn’t lost everything and weren’t, objectively speaking, bereft of hope — hell, they’d hardly lived long enough to have a clue to what life is about, though that might have contributed to their peculiar willingness to die (they really didn’t know what they’d be missing). No good reason for them to freak out and start killing people, let alone actually plan it. But prosperity is not a safeguard against alienation, as the children of the wealthy well know.

The Columbine shooters felt like outcasts, whether real or self-styled, and they became murderers who fully expected to die in the process. It would be easy to write them off as either bad seed or sulky fanatics dipped in angst and melodrama. If they hadn’t had guns and killed so many of their classmates, any faculty member who discovered their deep disaffection might have told them to cut the drama and learn some coping skills, while referring them for school-based therapy. But of course, it turned out to be too late for that.

In the end, the Columbine teens saw themselves as unwanted, out-of-place rejects, marginalized, and they were angry enough to kill over it and die for it. They wanted somebody to pay for their disillusionment and outrage.

And so did the London bombers.

There are plenty of outraged Muslims who, despite their anger over the political situation in the Middle East, will not kill, let alone become suicide bombers. What separates them from those who cross the line? Something makes the latter snap while the former do not.

The investigators working the London bombings should try to discover exactly when the four suicide bombers came to see themselves as so disenfranchised and their larger Islamic community so betrayed that they were willing to destroy themselves and others in order to make a very bloody point — and then see who they were talking to and fraternizing with at the time. Who took advantage of their disaffection and new-found fanaticism.

It’s now suspected that Lindsay, the Jamaican convert to Islam, organized the bombing. That makes a certain amount of sense: there’s no true believer like a convert, and nearly no one as willing to proselytize. And in a sense, the other three were also recent converts — in their case, to extreme Islam, which means they were ripe to be influenced by Lindsay or any other true hard-line believer. But who recruited Lindsay?

Which leads us to the next question: what made Lindsay angry enough to ‘go postal’ for his concept of Islam, and when/how did he reach that point? We need to know, and to understand.

The answers might make it easier to spot the next would-be suicide bombers before they light themselves up (and us with them).

2006-02-24T19:47:00.001-06:00

‘Going Postal’ for Islam

Sent on July 11, 2005

Here’s a theory for you: the London bombers were merely about to “go postal” — until some opportunistic terror strategist enlisted them to do what they were going to do anyway (die) but gave them a seemingly better reason (reward in Paradise) and a convenient rationalization for their own failures (it’s not your fault: those lousy infidels hate you and discriminate against you). It’s not as far-fetched as it sounds.

We're told in a variety of reportage that at least three of the London Bombers had been banned from all three of their local neighborhood mosques, for reasons nobody seems to want to share; that at least two were college dropouts, having failed as students; that one seemed to lose himself after the close of his local cricket pitch (field) where he'd been an enthusiastic sportsman until then (sports, ostensibly, had kept him out of trouble before, but his sport of choice was apparently no longer available locally; also, his father is in bad health and can’t hold down a regular job); and that at least one of the others may have had some lingering, stinging life disappointment recently. Two were unemployed or underemployed, and a third had traded university for working in his father’s fish and chips shop.

Sudden hard-line “conversions” to radical Islam notwithstanding, by bombing London these four were responding less like traditional terrorists and more like garden-variety American or European or Canadian hostage-takers and murder-suicides, who turn the rage of failed hopes, lost jobs, etc., on their own families, coworkers or neighbors. Think Michael Douglas’s character in the film “Falling Down.” These are people who have lost all hope but who also, upon closer examination, have developed absolutely no coping skills to deal with whatever misfortune life has handed them (we can argue another time about how much rationalization is involved and whose job it is to develop such coping skills in the first place). Stunted personalities, perhaps. Occasionally, they become snipers. Here, we just call them lone gunmen and nuts – probably because they haven't become pipe-bombers yet. But if our murder-suicide nutcases had suddenly become suicide bombers in big public areas instead of simply despondent wackos who take it out on the closest available people (i.e., the ones they know best), we'd be calling them terrorists, too — and perhaps missing the point because of it.

It seems to me that here and elsewhere, deeply disappointed, disillusioned, out-of-work types (overwhelmingly male; you've noticed this?) will reach for a gun or a knife and just go after either whoever is closest to them, so that no loved ones are left alive after they themselves die, or shoot or take hostages whom they blame in some way for their own disappointments, i.e., colleagues or other handy yet somehow related targets. This is what we mean when we talk about someone “going postal.”

On the other hand, when disillusioned, disappointed women go for the murder of those close to them, it'll usually be either the kids they hurt (could be post-partum depression but more likely a revenge thing against a husband or ex; remember Medea) or an abusive or straying husband or ex himself. These women rarely successfully commit suicide afterwards, if they even attempt it. Suicidal-homicidal women also rarely take unrelated hostages — and female Islamic suicide bombers are the very rare exception among despondent, murderous women, not the rule. Not nonexistent, mind you, just rare.

What Islamic terror strategists have done, perhaps, is to identify people like this — people alienated for largely personal reasons — and make use of them for political ends, cementing the likelihood that these recruits will really kill themselves by promising them forgiveness in Paradise and by granting whatever ails them enough to want to die over it some attention and, thereby, some legitimacy. The true (and still alive) terrorists merely acknowledge the pain of the already suicidal individuals and validate their murderous intentions while at the same time co-opting these suffering individuals’ deaths for their own quasi-religious and political reasons. The seeming romance of martyrdom provides not only cover for an otherwise cowardly act (suicide, aka taking the easy way out) but also appears to give not only purpose but blessing to an otherwise unforgiveable act, the murder of innocents. All this the potential suicide bombers are willing to do, to gain a false — and very temporary — sense of self-esteem.

Now, before we get too glib or superficial in our analysis, let’s stop here: two of the four bombers might have been categorized as ‘losers’ on paper, but the other two had wives, children, work, a reason for being. Why abandon their young families and go on a suicide run, taking loads of uninvolved strangers with them? Again, terrorist hunters need to look for whatever might have alienated an otherwise seemingly happy man. Consider how he might have felt marginalized even in a society where he seemed to fit in and wherein his family members are moderate in outlook and trying to assimilate.

Then look even further: do any family members belong to a group or Islamic sect that would have been marginalized or persecuted back in Pakistan, the country of their origin? Have they encountered some particular difficulties in their new country of residence? Are there other relevant influences? (Hint: British newspapers reported that Mohammed Sidique Khan, the suspected organizer of the quartet, supposedly suffered from depression, which may or may not have gone untreated, and was reportedly angry over the rising death toll in Iraq. Depression is sometimes described as unresolved or denied internalized anger. The personal and the political overlapped for him, perhaps.)

It won’t be that simple, of course. Yes, Khan could have been depressed, but suicidal depressed people don’t usually try to take complete strangers with them. Yes, he frequented an Islamic bookstore, but so did others who aren’t violent, let alone murderous. That’s not enough in itself. That he either refused to go to his local mosques or was banned from doing so may or may not be a better place to start looking for reasons. All four bombers met at the radical Stratford Street mosque in Beeston; they were likely recruited by someone there, but that wasn’t the source of their personal alienation. The young men’s reasons, whatever they were, got their start elsewhere; Beeston is merely where someone else capitalized on them.

None of this is meant to excuse what suicidal individuals do, in the end: no matter how depressed, they’re not insane — and the only way they can justify committing murder along with suicide is through rationalization, either personal or the quasi-religious variety that the terror strategists offer. But this may be a new way to look at how Islamic radicals recruit some of their suicides: find disillusioned people who are about to go postal anyway, and use them.

It should also give the terrorist hunters and policymakers a new way to parse the intelligence they gather: look for the deeply disillusioned and alienated, the marginalized individuals, research them, track them, and see who tempts them into martyrdom. Better still, get to them before the radical strategists can. If you can find any way to give these disaffected cause for hope (preferably while you’re teaching them some coping skills), you may yet turn them away from bombing their disappointments into oblivion and taking others with them.

This is not a prescription for giving therapy to would-be terrorists instead of forming a good defense against terrorism, merely a way one might identify potential suicide bombers — but in keeping such vulnerable individuals out of the grasp of extremists, one can deprive Islamic extremists and insurgents of some cannon fodder along the way. We should take our small victories wherever we can.

2006-02-24T06:37:00.001-06:00

In Defense of (Real) Blondes: An Open Letter to Men’s Health and Men Everywhere

Sent August 23, 2004

I occasionally pick up Men’s Health and one or two other men’s magazines (GQ, Esquire) just to check out what they’re telling men about women — and to see whether or not I think what they’re saying is true (as I’m still dating, forewarned is forearmed). Imagine my annoyance when I discovered that Men’s Health is still parroting — and reinforcing — the same old anti-blonde stereotypes (“Head-to-Head: Blonde vs. Brunette,” September 2004 issue). Nothing but blonde jokes could be more offensive, and being a lifelong blonde — yes, I have baby and grade-school pictures to prove it — I’m particularly pissed that they used so-called experts to justify their prejudices (how do we know they’re experts? Who sez?), without ever citing or questioning the actual sources. Whatever happened to proper attribution? I felt like giving the entire editorial management and most of the quoted sources a thump in the head.

As a journalist and policy analyst, I’m frequently in the position of being a debunker of popular myth. Clearly, I have to do it again if I ever want American men to take blondes (and me) seriously. Here in Chicago, we journalists have a saying: If your mother says she loves you, check it out – and Men’s Health should have been much more conscientious about checking out and questioning its sources. Let’s get specific.

A referenced survey by askmen.com found that men prefer blondes for dating. I’m not necessarily questioning askmen.com’s survey results, although I do want to know about their process; these were, apparently, self-selected respondents, not a random sample. That the respondents favored blondes is no surprise: that result feeds on popular myth about blondes (e.g., blondes are more desirable, blondes have more fun, blondes are hotter, etc.).

Consider the classic American stereotypes/icons than U.S. men have lodged in their memory. They fall into two categories: first, the classic sirens like Mae West, Jean Harlow, Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield, and more recently, new sirens that include supermodels and celebrities as well as actresses: Sharon Stone, Kathleen Turner, Madonna, Claudia Schiffer, Cheryl Tiegs, Melanie Griffith, Christie Brinkley, and so on. I won’t even go into how many brunette actresses, models or celebrities have blonded themselves to trade on that mythology; I’m sure you can count those yourselves.

Second are the cool, calm, collected, elusive Hitchcockian-style ice blondes: Kim Novak, Tippi Hedren, Ursula Andress, Catherine Deneuve, Sharon Stone (yeah, she seems to straddle both types, depending on the role), Kim Basinger (think L.A. Confidential, where she does a Veronica Lake turn), half the interchangeable blondes on the international catwalk today (most of whom are failed Deneuve-wannabes), and nearly every anonymous blonde background model/dancer in music videos.

Much more rarely does anyone think of the really smart, funny, or wise-ass knockout blondes who can think their way around any man without an eyelash out of place: Lauren Bacall, Carole Lombard, Ginger Rogers, and, more recently, Glenn Close (think of the cunning queen in Mel Gibson’s Hamlet), Joan Allen (particularly in The Contender and the latest Bourne film), Michelle Pfeiffer, Charlize Theron, and Gwyneth Paltrow (and consider which of those ladies blonded themselves to dine off the myth).

Then there are a few kick-ass blondes like Peta Wilson (lives there a man who didn’t want to be held captive by La Femme Nikita?). Forget the ridiculous Charlie’s Angels, in either version: Nikita’s real antecedent was the mother of all kick-ass female icons, fellow blonde Honor Blackman, who played the notorious Pussy Galore in Goldfinger and Cathy Gale in the hip British cult series The Avengers (Blackman’s Gale was predecessor to Diana Rigg’s wonderful Emma Peel and so many imitators threafter). TV’s Alias and Uma Thurman’s Bride in Kill Bill volumes 1 and 2 owe as much or more to Wilson’s and Blackman’s ground-breaking roles as they do to Bond movies in general or to Hong Kong martial arts films. Thurman, of course, is another icon who blonded herself to join the roster (remember: she was brunette in Henry and June). I could go on.

The point is, this is one hell of a bench as icons go. On the other side, brunettes have bombshells Ava Gardner, Sophia Loren, Jane Russell, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Cindy Crawford, Salma Hayek, and … who? There are plenty of comely, impressive brunettes who nevertheless don’t qualify as bombshells. Julia Roberts? Sandra Bullock? J-Lo?? Please. The girls next door, sure, but not bombshells.

The Greta Garbos, Ingrid Bergmans, and Nicole Kidmans of the world don’t count because their hair color was/is either between blonde and brunette to start or changes depending on the role (and yet, aren’t their blonde roles among the most memorable in men’s minds? Think about it). Not unlike Meryl Streep, they are phenomenal chameleons in service to their art. And of course, men project their own desires and expectations onto blonde mythology and the women who depict it.

The second point is that nobody thinks of most of the above-mentioned blondes, including the temporary or recently converted ones, as stupid or ditzy — calculating at times, untouchable, provocative, shrewd, even unfathomable, yes, but not stupid. So how is it that whenever men think of the intelligence level of blondes, they don’t think of, say, AIDS activist and researcher Mathilde Krim, CBS’s Leslie Stahl, or PBS-turned-CNN anchor Judy Woodruff but of the dim-witted images of Lisa Kudrow, Goldie Hawn, or Jessica Simpson? (Uh, any original blondes in that last bunch? I think not. And I’m not saying they actually are dim; we’re talking perception here.)

Please note that Scandinavians, Swiss, Czechs, or Dutch, for example, don’t automatically consider their blondes — of either gender — to be dim or ditzy. Attitudes are a bit different in Europe: it’s assumed that all educated young women are and should be serious, and that doesn’t seem to detract one bit from their sexiness or desirability. Watching the recent Summer Olympics, I found the blonde roster impressive: Heather Bown of our own volleyball team; Inge De Bruijn, the fastest woman sprint swimmer, who out of her swim cap bears a more than passing resemblance to Peta Wilson; bubbly Swedish heptathlete Carolina Kluft, whose enthusiasm is infectious and who came to the Olympics to have fun as well as win a gold medal or two; runners Jolanda Ceplak of Slovenia and Yulija Nesterenko of Belarus, who are all business on the track; there are too many blondes to mention, and none of them strike me as dumb. Far from it: you can’t reach that level of international competition by being a bubblehead.

Yet psychologist Tony Fallone, quoted in the Men’s Health piece, reports that men generally consider blondes more flaky. Even if that much were true, 1) this may or may not be a representative sample of all men (how do we know? It’s not like he told us his methodology — he may refer to a self-selected sample of men who decided to use his services) and 2) Fallone still reports only the perception among men, not the reality for blonde women.

To what, exactly, do men attribute their perceptions about blondes’ intelligence? Not hard data, clearly. And conventional ‘wisdom’ is often suspect. Dippy bubbleheadedness is more a symptom of youth and inexperience — or perhaps a sign of Valley Girls, that epitomy of silly American teens — than it is a result of hair color. As a Mensa dropout (yup, I got bored, and most of the men were either spoken-for proto-yuppies or geeky nerds with poor social skills), I can testify to at least the local truth that brunettes weren’t disproportionately represented among the membership when I was a member. But I was in my early twenties then. By now, some of the female members may have blonded themselves, skewing the numbers slightly; apparently, aging brunettes prefer to go blonde rather than gray.

Anthropologist Hans Juergens (also mentioned in the offending article) found that brunettes looking for husbands received twice as many replies to their personals ads as blondes did; this also doesn’t surprise me. But I don’t automatically draw the same conclusion that Fallone did, and neither did Juergens (I’ve seen that study; Juergens is much more cautious than Fallone about extrapolating the reasons behind his results). But Men’s Health foolishly didn’t provide particulars or at least a citation for Juergens’s study so that the readers could analyze it for themselves. We aren’t even told where the anthropologist works, or whether he’s an academic or affiliated with a polling organization.

Stupidly, Fallone asserts that “blondes tend to be bigger risk takers and more likely to want to play around,” then doesn’t bother to offer any data to support this assertion. Gee, could he possibly be parroting men’s beliefs instead of fact — or rationalizing men’s reasons for being tempted by blondes in the first place? (More myth: men chase blondes because you think we’re more likely to fool around, therefore more likely to fool around with you in particular, supposedly increasing your chances of getting laid. Fat chance. Show me the data, you dope! Either that, or shut up already. (Oh, and Men’s Health decides to underscore this contention in a less than subliminal way when on page 154 of the same September issue, they use a blonde model to illustrate an article on the 6 ways men can tell if their women are getting ready to cheat on them. What, they couldn’t find a suitable redhead?? Just kidding, all you lovely strawberries out there.)

As you can tell by now, I’m losing patience with this inane scenario. Even if — and that’s a very big if — Fallone were able to cite any hard studies to support his ludicrous assertions, I’d want to know several things about such studies before I granted their results any validity. First, the sample size: some people call an informal poll of 20 people on the street a “study” even though that clearly doesn’t compare with the well constructed ones conducted by sociologists, anthropologists, and sexologists who have to publish and survive peer review. Pepper Schwartz and crew at the University of Washington or the folks at the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, for example, will freely tell you their sample size, methodology, margin of error, and question list for the surveys and studies they conduct.

Which brings us to the second area of concern: what was asked and how the questions were worded. Anyone familiar with survey research or opinion polling will tell you that how the questions are asked can skew the answers, as can the way the sample was selected. Keep this in mind, fellas: it’s an election year, and you’ll be hearing a lot about poll results without being told what the questions were, word for word. Be skeptical.

Third — and this I consider the most important factor, in this case — before we go making sweeping conclusions about what blondes are or aren’t more likely to do, let’s separate the deliberately and artificially blonded brunettes from the real blondes when we set up the survey sample. That way, one can control for the attitudes and behavior of those women who specifically became blonde so that they could live the myth from actual blondes who may feel no need to do so (and may, in fact, be tired of fighting the myth and its automatic, oppressive expectations of them).

Did any of the studies that Fallone might be tempted to cite (or any studies of blondes versus brunettes, for that matter) actually do this? If not, their results might be seriously skewed —therefore erroneous and irrelevant, not to mention grossly misleading. After all, it might be the converts who make blondes as a group seem more promiscuous or dumb; they may have blonded themselves to get a little more action and thought that just changing hair color would accomplish this (yeah, that would be kind of dumb). Maybe the blonded should be in their own sample, with real blondes and real brunettes as two separate control groups. Until someone does this, any statements about who’s more insipid or more likely to cheat are pure speculation.

Finally, let me suggest a more plausible reason for Juergens’s results: men’s awareness of their own and other men’s attitudes toward blondes, their manifold insecurities, and the desire to reduce the competition. Men know full well what other men supposedly think of blondes — and when they decide to settle down, many men get territorial about their brides and prefer that they be slightly less attractive to other men (therefore supposedly less likely to get hit on by other men and tempted into infidelity). It’s called protecting turf, not to mention potentially protecting your heart (or so they think), and this attitude may very well lead men to prefer brunettes as brides even though they may prefer blondes as dates — without regard to the merits of any individual women. But again, is such behavior based on actual data, or on men’s perceptions about the women in question? My bet is on perception.

You see where I’m going with this. You think you have troubles being taken seriously, fellas? Try being blonde, blue-eyed, short, and female. Add to that a 36C bustline and a pretty face, and nobody takes you seriously unless you come across as a whip-smart, street-smart intellectual from the moment you open your mouth. But of course, if you do that, by the time you close your mouth you’ve scared to death about half the men in the room. So you backpedal, soften it a bit, and they miss the point, being immersed in the blonde myth instead. They don’t see you.

And there is no middle ground. Please don’t give me that limp line about being ‘assertive’ instead of aggressive (and which psychobabble advocate thought up that chestnut?). In my line of work, there is no such thing as an ‘assertive’ reporter — you’re either aggressive enough to get the story, or you fail. So I’m aggressive (on the job, anyway), confident, ambitious, accomplished. I have dreams, aspirations, opinions, other talents I’m developing, other interests. I’ve made the most of my education and keep learning new things. All of this would make a man more attractive, yet it seems to work against me. I just don’t conform to expectations: men look at me, see the blonde hair, and are confused. Worse, when men think of trophy women, blonde, competent, stylish, aggressive, and whip-smart just doesn’t seem to go together for them.

Is this what Harold Bloom referred to when he wrote that all of Shakespeare’s great heroines had to settle for lesser men (because that’s all they had available to them)?

Some days, there’s just no winning against the blonde myth. It would be so easy to just give up on a love life and focus on my career (more than enough trouble battling the blonde myth there, thank you). Yet, while there’s life, there’s hope, so I hope — I’m perverse that way. There have to be smart, attractive, good-hearted men out there who can and do think beyond stereotypes, yes? Perhaps even a few who have some hair left??

Then I read David Zinczenko’s editor’s note in that same September issue, about finding style icons who “project qualities we’d all like to have: defiance, wit, and sheer, unadulterated cool.” And I smiled to myself: the clueless man is talking about me. And I wouldn’t trade what or who I am for a nanosecond, let alone allow some silly guy to define what I ought to be.

Gentlemen, you do yourselves an extreme disservice by staying stuck in your own prejudices and underestimating blondes. Evolve, already! We have. Time to cut us a break: you’ll never know what you have to gain until you do (wink!).

Sincerely,

Policywonk
independent journalist, policy diva, and
whip-smart, street-smart, unrepentant, defiantly intellectual blonde babe

2006-02-24T03:03:00.001-06:00

Grounded in Unreality

Sent July 15, 2004

Alan Keyes is living proof of the fact that a supposedly intelligent man with an advanced degree from an Ivy League school can still have a grating personality and be pretty stupid when it comes to dealing with people. There’s nothing politically smart, for example, about gratuitously insulting the daughter of your own party’s vice-presidential candidate. George W. Bush, on the other hand, is proof that someone who botched his education at an Ivy League school that he never could have enrolled in on his own merits can still be pretty clever about conning the public by being a seemingly nice, decisive guy about it.

That’s the big difference between Keyes and Bush the Lesser, and what makes the latter more politically effective than the former. What they have in common, though, is scarier: they’re bold, decisive, and speak from strong conviction — about all the wrong things, for all the wrong reasons, and they’re both devastatingly divorced from reality. These guys are so out of it, they wouldn’t recognize a reality check if it punched them in the nose — all the more reason they need one (the reality check, or the punch in the nose? Take your pick.).

Here’s the question all voters should force themselves to answer before they enter a voting booth: what good is decisiveness and conviction if you’re decisive about and convinced of all the wrong things? What good is it if a man acts boldly but stupidly, because virtually everything he believes and acts upon has been repeatedly shown to be untrue? That’s exactly what Bush the Lesser has been doing for four years — while the polls continue to reward him for it.

If a fool does this on the street and hurts no one but himself, that’s one thing. When he does it as the chief executive of the world’s major superpower and international economic engine — and trashes our relationships with nearly every major ally, spends so much money while giving useless tax breaks to the rich that it will take us 40 to 50 years to dig out from under the national debt (if we ever do), mortgages the future of our children, panders to the powerful corporate elite while the middle class and the poor pay for it, deliberately misleads people about any connection between the war on terrorism and the war in Iraq or between Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden (you remember him, the guy who was really behind 9/11?), lies to get us into an unnecessary war that members of his own party say he was contemplating months before September 11 occurred, and ruins or ends thousands of lives in the process — that’s quite another thing.

There are some impeachable offenses here, much more serious ones than the one that got Bill Clinton into trouble. Wouldn’t leading the nation into war under false pretenses, for example, count more than, say, fibbing about oral sex in the Oval Office so that your wife won’t find out? Remember: when Clinton lied, nobody died — but W. has blood on his hands, more of it with every passing day, and those Iraqi civilians who happen to be innocent still have to live in the middle of the war that Bush created, as do our troops and those of the few allies we still have left. And we’re not even counting the average Americans who have been punished by — or died because of — one or another policy or cutback that Bush-Cheney instituted so that their friends and financial supporters could line their pockets. Nor are we talking about the ballooning national debt, being bought up largely these days by Asian banks and the occasional Arab potentate, which Shrub in his dementia created by not being able to do math (what, you mean he can’t cut taxes and spend ten times what he’s taking in without the debt becoming a national security issue?? Yep, pretty much).

For all of this, the war in Iraq has served as cover and as a huge distraction, to keep us, the public, off topic. But it’s gone on for this long because we let it.

What is most disturbing to me is the unreasonable degree to which average Americans — voters in particular — are unwilling to hold W. accountable for either his stupidity or his sins. Because they perceive him as likeable, as decisive, as having convictions, to this they attribute some kind of moral value. Never mind that that they seem to be doing this in an ethical void or that much of what he says he believes is a demonstrable lie — or that he’s been forced to take back what he’s said or backtrack on what he’s done multiple times (on Iraq, for example) precisely because he’s been proven wrong each time. Anybody remember W. going back and forth on the intelligence czar issue (sure smells like flip-flopping, doesn’t it)?

Remarkably, being proven wrong doesn’t stop Shrub from believing untrue things and repeating the lies to us. How many 9/11 commissions does it take for him to admit he was wrong about a connection between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein? And how many speaking tours do members of the 9/11 commission have to undertake before people stop giving him a pass for lying about connections between Iraq and Al Qaeda? Even the Republicans on the commission concede that Bush is wrong about this — so why do people still think his convictions are so great? An objective observer would conclude that either Bush or the voters (or possibly both) are delusional.

The fact that a deluded man really believes his delusions doesn’t mean he’s right, or that we should reward his convictions — quite the contrary, it usually means we send him off to get disabused of his notions and treatment for his condition. The main difference between a deluded neurotic in the street and a hallucinating president is that the latter can do far more damage. So why reward delusion with a second term instead of a prescription and a referral to a good shrink?

Possibly because admitting that W. is delusional might mean that we’d have to admit our own political illusions — like that we can have our own personal tax cuts and not increase the budget deficit or add to the national debt, or that we don’t bear any responsibility for the idiots we put into office. Yeah, sure, and I’m going to be Pope next week (which would require, among other things, a sex change first; not bloody likely). Therapists call this phenomenon folie a deux — a delusion shared by two; neither party calls the other on his fantasies because he’d have to admit his own and thereby destroy his own neurotic self-image. In W.’s case, we’re talking folie en masse.

Alan Keyes has all the political acumen of a pretzel, which means we’re in no danger of having him as an elected official. All he’ll ever get is a platform from which to harangue us about issues that are important to him but won’t help us balance the budget, feed or school our kids, fix the economy or get better jobs, create peace and stability in the world, or repair relations with our allies. Keyes, therefore, is for the moment harmless. George W. Bush is another story.

Yes, one can be stupid and blind about the real world but still remain electable — and the key, apparently, is just to keep repeating embarrassingly obvious, repeatedly disproven lies often enough and with enough conviction that people will at least reward your nerve and consistency, if not your lack of intelligence and dishonesty. But what does that say about us?

Based on their delusions alone, neither Keyes nor Bush deserves to hold public office of any kind. Not even dog catcher. To operate from the realm of fantasy, as W. daily demonstrates, costs the nation an enormous debt in money and human lives. It’s his fault and his debt, one he’ll never be able to erase — but if you allow him to continue in this manner, it’s your fault, too. Don’t make the rest of us pay for your delusions: we’ll already be paying for his for years.

2006-02-24T01:18:00.002-06:00

Reagan’s gone, but the lies live on — if we let them

Sent June 11, 2004

It’s time to speak ill of the dead. Ronald Reagan is gone, but the Big Lies live on. The nation and the media may have a knee-jerk desire to say nice things about the recently departed, but preserving historical accuracy allows some incivility. In this case, history begs for it, so I come not to praise Caesar but to bury him.

Whether it’s ingrained good manners, guilt at the prospect of upsetting the grieving widow, or just chickening out of speaking truth when the deceased’s supporters are plentiful and loud, there’s been a wave of willful myopia about Reagan that’s affected most of the media and the political world since his death. There are times when frankness is necessary, however, and this is one.

That the New York Times, Washington Post, and many other newspapers so softballed their obituaries and editorials raises eyebrows, but not as much as the fact that some of those obits, editorials, and columns repeat the big lies that the press rightfully challenged when they were first spun. It’s as if the media have developed collective amnesia about Reagan — at the exact moment that Republican spinmeisters are doing their damndest to make sure we swallow those big lies, so that history will be biased accordingly and so that we are more favorably disposed to the sad case in the White House who is currently up for reelection. We’ve even forgotten that political hacks and flak-catchers earned the sobriquet ‘spinmeisters’ during the Reagan Administration, because that’s when they perfected the practice of ‘spinning’ bad news into an art.

Reagan wasn’t the first politician on earth to use the Big Lie and won’t be the last, but his administration did use it particularly well. There are two requirements to using the Big Lie effectively: repetition (i.e., overwhelm the truth by making sure the lie is repeated far more often than the truth is) and seeming sincerity. Reagan’s ability to persuade clearly was aided by his actor’s training, but as David Broder noted in the Washington Post, it helped Reagan greatly that he actually believed some of the lies he told. Like the ones about Iran-Contra, for example. “The reason that Reagan was persuasive, I came to understand, was that he had first persuaded himself of the truth of his utterances,” Broder writes. “Much later, when someone hung the title ‘The Great Communicator’ on Reagan, I thought to myself, It should be ‘The Great Persuader.’” The ability to persuade, of course, doesn’t mean that what you’re saying is actually true. In Reagan’s case, it often wasn’t. Anybody remember his administration’s notion of ketchup as a vegetable, or the idea that trees cause pollution?

The effusive tributes to Reagan are surprising to those of us who know just how controversial Reagan and his decisions were and still remain. What is more disturbing is that those who covered Reagan still unthinkingly let the propoganda about Reagan stand instead of debunking it. Even Broder, who knows better, somehow can’t stop himself from repeating yet another Big Lie about Reagan, in this case that he was responsible for the fall of the Berlin Wall.

That’s a lie that needs to be exposed and discounted right now. No, David, it didn’t happen because Reagan so believed that it should, nor because he demanded that Mr. Gorbachev “tear down that wall” – that was just gratuitous grandstanding by Reagan that made for good but highly misleading video. The Berlin Wall really came down because the Germans, and most particularly the East Germans, decided to take it down and Gorbachev didn’t stop them. Gorbachev's demurring to interfere with the Germans was the key, not Reagan's bluster.

And here we come to perhaps one of the most persistent and egregious of the Big Lies told about Ronald Reagan: that he is somehow responsible for or contributed to the end of the Cold War. Bull - the one and only person who is responsible for the end of the Cold War, the one person without which it never would have happened, is Mikhail Gorbachev. Without Gorbachev, it wouldn’t have mattered what the sitting American president might have wanted. Nothing would have happened without the consent of the Soviet president, however, so it did matter who that person was. It also mattered that the internal damage to the Soviet Union was overwhelming and had already been largely accomplished long before Reagan became the U.S. president. To insist otherwise is to stubbornly ignore 70 years of Soviet history, something Reagan’s supporters are quite willing to do.

It’s also nonsense to insist that Reagan’s costly defense build-up made any real difference to anything besides our own economy. It wasn’t just the arms race that cost the Soviet Union, nor was it the main factor damaging the Soviet economy. Communism was. We forget that Gorbachev is first and foremost an economist: for most of his career, he had a front-row view of exactly how the Soviet economy had been deteriorating for 70 years, how badly it had been mismanaged because Lenin and Stalin thought they could rewrite economic reality on a whim, and how badly the Soviet Union’s production capacity had been demolished over the decades. Gorbachev saw how severely the populace had been frightened and demoralized by the murders of 20 million that Stalin killed for political reasons and by the imprisonment and deaths of many others under subsequent premiers — and to what degree that and collectivization had killed Soviet productivity. Russia had never experienced industrialization before Communism and didn’t know how to do it correctly; Communist policies merely made the situation much worse.

Gorbachev also understood the finer points of the rest of the Soviet budget. He knew, for example, how much subsidizing the Iron Curtain countries and Soviet satellites like Cuba cost the Russian nation, not to mention insurgencies in places like Afghanistan. As for the space race, national pride and a touch of old-style Russian paranoia would have kept those Soviet expenditures high even without the Cold War: Soviet Russia had a certain standing as a superpower that it wanted to maintain on the international stage, and that meant it couldn’t defer to the U.S. in the space race any more than it could routinely defer to the U.S. in the United Nations.

Moreover, the Cold War wouldn’t have ended if Gorbachev hadn’t first prepared the way through several years of glasnost and perestroika, during which time reforms could be begun while the fallacies and failures of Communism could begin to be freely discussed and documented in public with the release of government memos and secret files. Without glasnost allowing freer flow of information, Gorbachev likely would have been deposed by either his own Politburo or the Soviet Army; even with glasnost, he had to walk a very fine line. And given that Gorbachev did want to end the Cold War, it didn’t matter who the U.S. president was — because any U.S. president who wasn’t completely out of his mind would have agreed.

So it wasn’t Reagan’s arms spending or our posturing that pushed Gorbachev into action; it was the fact that the economist understood precisely what Communism was costing his country and recognized that the Soviet Union could no longer afford Communism if it wanted to survive. Reagan’s contribution was marginal; what credit he deserves is for the fact that he cooperated, while Gorbachev took all the risks and did all the heavy lifting. Even if you wanted to insist that Reagan’s defense build-up prompted a similar response in Moscow and that was the final blow to Communism, should the last straw that broke the camel’s back get most of the credit for doing so, or should the entire haystack that preceded it? Come on, now — do the math.

While the Republican spin machine goes into overdrive and funerary tributes continue to spew pablum, we have to ask ourselves: why do we allow ourselves to swallow this pap when the facts tell us something quite different? Whatever respect we give to the office of the presidency doesn’t obligate us to automatically sanctify dead presidents; we must judge those individuals solely on their merits, yet we’re reluctant to do so. Part of the answer where Reagan is concerned is his having developed Alzheimer’s disease; it seems in bad taste to kick a guy when he’s down, as if his diagnosis could retroactively excuse all the misstatements and bad decisions made years earlier. Well, of course it can’t, and the moment one expresses the notion of such retroactive forgiveness out loud, one realizes how ridiculous it is.

Another reason we’re more than willing to overlook Reagan’s many political sins is that some of us liked the folksy, just-an-average-guy image of the late president (I didn’t buy it, but I’m clearly in the minority; I tend to believe facts, not images). We like that he was a cheerleader for the U.S. The problem is that U.S. presidents are asked to fill two roles, that of the largely ceremonial chief of state (i.e., chief cheerleader) and that of chief executive (the person who actually has to run the nation). Cheerful Reagan made a great chief of state, but as a CEO, he was bloody awful — and that’s a whole other discussion.

But Reagan wasn’t just an optimist, he was a Pollyanna — a pejorative term for someone who insists that salvation is at hand when, in fact, disaster has long since arrived. A positive attitude or brave face in the wake of tragedy is one thing. Willful blindness is quite another, and Reagan made a happy habit of ignoring inconvenient truths. An anecdote retold by Broder illustrates just how casual an attitude Reagan had about truth. Charlie McDowell, Washington correspondent for the Richmond (VA) Times-Dispatch, once bemoaned the fact that he’d inadvertently created a tall tale about seeing Reagan in a local Virginia drugstore during the filming of “Brother Rat,” only to discover later that all Reagan’s scenes had been shot in Hollywood. When McDowell admitted this to Reagan, the former president told him not to worry about it: “You believed it because you wanted to believe it. There’s nothing wrong with that. I do it all the time.” And he did it long before the Alzheimer’s kicked in.

Now, ignoring inconvenient reality might work at times for a minor problem, but it doesn’t work in economics, as Mr. Gorbachev well knows. Ronald Reagan never conceded this. But we Americans love our cheerleaders (note Dr. Phil) and are willing to forgive them almost anything, including being removed from reality, as long as they genially keep us smiling and tell us what we want to hear (this is where Dr. Phil differs from Dr. Ronnie: the former uses his folksiness to make hard truths more palatable, whereas the latter used his to dis Democrats and promote Republican mythology).

We elected cheerleader Reagan in part because we couldn’t forgive Jimmy Carter for saying the nation was “in a malaise” when, in fact, it was — and Reagan painted us a much nicer, if false, picture. We’d rather hear about how great we are. We ought to care more about how we’re going to get out of whatever hole we’ve dug ourselves into at the moment, but we’re only ready to hear that when things are really painful. Which means, by the way, that we ought to listen carefully this year to what political candidates, Kerry and Bush especially, have to say, given the painful economy that has hurt so many. We should remember, too, that Bush the incumbent is trying to get reelected by trading on Reagan’s well-spun image and repeating some Big Lies of his own.

Reagan’s lies should be buried with him — and if Shrub keeps lying to us, we should bury him, too.

2006-02-24T00:57:00.000-06:00

re: Maureen Dowd – DeLay, Deny and Demagogue
New York Times, Thursday, March 23, 2005
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/24/opinion/24dowd.html

From Bob Roberts, sent March 24, 2005:

... This is what makes me so angry. I know we disagree on the basic issue; I think Michael Schiavo is a liar, and I don't believe he knew, has proof or can prove that Terri wanted to die and personally believe he should be charged with murder if she does. (I'm really suspicious of anyone who has a wife in this state AND another long-term relationship with kids. I'm sorry. The vows said "for better or for worse." Perhaps it's my personal experience that drives that, but I find it difficult to believe he's been "there for her" when he goes home to someone else each night.) But I know we agree on one thing ... that the actions of the more-sanctimonious-than-thou group who claim to be in Terri's corner really drive us nuts. For me, it's not so much what they've done but why they're doing it.

I believe, as Dowd does, that none of them care a whit about Terri Schiavo at all and I REALLY object to them loading all of their baggage onto her back. Their overall agenda creeps me out, and this is just more confirmation. I have a right in this country to believe as I see fit and should not have one group's version of The Truth, or whatever you want to call it, shoved down my throat. It's what many of our ancestors came here to avoid, even if most of them weren't particularly tolerant of others' religions.

If the public reaction to the federal attempt at intervention is to build a groundswell against DeLay and Co., I say great, even if I disagree with the majority on this issue. DeLay is evil. Flat out. Something has to stop him.

As for the law, all the more reason to spell out everything in writing ahead of time. I really don't think other people should be forced to "play God" and decide what others might want. My druthers are to err on the side of life because if you guess wrong with the alternative, it's too late. I don't know how you go about prompting people to spell out their end-of-life desires ahead of time. Let's face it ... many people don't even have wills, let alone "living wills." But it's the only way to be certain, and we owe those we love and cherish nothing less.

This bunch is so tax-break happy. Maybe the government should offer a one-time tax break to anyone who can prove they have a living will. To save the controversy and heartbreak, it would be money well spent.

bob

From policywonk, sent March 25, 2005:

Bob —

Of course we agree about the demagogues and their true reasons and agendas. I'm not so sure that we disagree about erring on the side of life — but my real problem is what we mean by that. Absolutely, people should have living wills — and mine, oddly enough, would stipulate that for as long as I have functioning the part of my brain that actually does the thinking, judging and remembering (NOT just the part that controls autonomic functions like breathing, digesting food, regulating hormones, etc.), I'd want to be kept not only alive but otherwise physically healthy. Gimme those vitamins and antioxidants, please, in a daily parenteral cocktail!! And don't spare the physical therapy. But if that thinking part of my brain's gone, never to return, well, I've checked out, folks, and I've got an organ donor signature on the back of my driver's license for the rest.

To me, it's that part of the brain where human consciousness resides that is the deciding factor: if it's working, great, but if it's not and can never again be made to work, that person's dead regardless that the heart's still pumping and lungs are still breathing on their own. Death means the permanent, irretrievable loss of consciousness, i.e. mind, the defining characteristic of our humanity; I'm not referring just to the ability of a person to be awake and alert but to the existence of mind on a human level.

Mere coma means that the physical capacity for consciousness/mind is still there and retrievable. Brain death, of course, means that brain function is gone completely. But there is still that ill-defined in between wherein what physicians currently refer to as a persistent vegetative state may or may not mean that the part of the brain that thinks, reasons and communicates is still working.

There are a few such children born every year (or stillborn, more likely) with part of the physical structure of the brain missing; if they live at all, it's only for hours, days at most. More often, such fetuses are miscarried: nature discards many kinds of genetic failures during pregnancy as mistakes that aren't worth the investment of the mother's physical resources. This is an evolutionary phenomenon that persists over generations, a result of natural selection.

Mind is the product of brain, so where there's an inadequate structure to produce mind, there isn't a person there, merely an incomplete attempt at a person. Clearly, the result is human in origin and yet falls short of meeting the definition of a human being — because the part that is the key defining characteristic, the human mind with its capacity for sophisticated reasoning, was never there. Its presence is wholly dependent on adequate physical structure, which never developed. We dignify such stillborn or short-lived offspring by calling them persons, but that is a matter of traditional consensus, not fact. Out of custom, we call any human fetus that is born dead or alive a human being, because lacking data we still have to draw the line somewhere, and for those born live, it’s a pretty good yardstick. But the presence or absence of mind is where we ought to draw the line.

Once the part of the brain's structure that produces mind stops working, that's it: we know of no way to get it back, because it's like a hard disk that has been not only wiped but physically damaged so that it can't be reprogrammed. Mind is not retrievable at that point — which means the person is gone for good. My understanding of Ms. Schiavo's condition is that her physicians have long agreed that that has been the case almost from the time she first went into a persistent vegetative state. Years, in short. [note to me: at least one blog claims that the cerebral cortex of the brain has liquefied, but I don’t know that to be true; if it is, that would sure explain the consensus among her physicians. This would be verifiable by autopsy.] The brain stem still works, apparently, but that controls only autonomic functions and organs. If the amygdala, the old lizard part of the brain located underneath the two lobes and connected to the brain stem, is still working, there might still be a brain wave — but that's not what produces human consciousness, either, although the amygdala does influence consciousness once it's there.

We don't know a lot about the human brain yet, but we do know that much. And it's enough to know that the person who was Terri Schiavo has been gone for years. She's not coming back, folks. All that's left is the carrying case for the person who used to be there. No amount of wishful thinking or desperate efforts by parents who don't want to survive their own children will change that. It's a bloody awful situation, but one in which the medical judgment of experts who have actually examined Schiavo's body and monitored its condition for years should have prevailed. And everyone else should butt out of the decisionmaking, most particularly the politicians at all levels.

Maintaining the body that used to be Ms. Schiavo is not erring on the side of life — it's kidding yourself at the expense of not only her family but the state and the society about when life ends. And it's expense for care that would be better spent on, for example, proper prenatal care and nutrition for impoverished or uninsured mothers and their living children — you know, the people Medicaid was intended for? — not the desperate and outrageously expensive end-of-life care because-we-don't-want-to-face-death cases, the ones that waste the precious and shrinking budgets we do have to maintain the unraveling safety net. More than three-quarters of what we spend on Medicaid annually is spent on the elderly and disabled, mostly nursing home costs, and much of that is for end-of-life care. I'm not saying that all of it is inappropriate care or badly spent, merely that we're not spending that money for the purpose originally intended, and someone else is getting shafted because we won't face end-of-life issues head on as a society and instead let the right-to-lifers bully us.

I predict that at some point — one would hope sooner rather than later, but I really doubt that — we will discuss at what point life begins in terms of at what stage a fetus has a brain sufficiently developed structurally to produce and support a human level of mind or consciousness. It isn't enough to have the equivalent of a cat brain or a rat brain or a lizard brain, or even an ape brain: there may be only a slight difference between our genome and that of chimpanzees, and yet the capacity for mind is orders of magnitudes different. Otherwise, they'd be working out Fermat's theorem and splitting the atom, too, instead of just us doing that. I don't even care how many apes you can teach sign language to — there's still a vast difference in consciousness, and evolution doesn't work so fast that they'll be catching up to us any time soon.

And the only benchmark we currently have to use is the brain structure and level of consciousness of a healthy, full-term human newborn. I suspect that the necessary brain structure for that level of consciousness isn't there until late in the third trimester; it certainly isn't there at 24 or 26 or 28 weeks, even though we can keep fetuses delivered at that stage alive with enormous investment of medical resources — but what is there at that point is the real possibility that, assuming the newborn survives, the necessary brain structure to support the mind will develop, barring catastrophe. At the end of life, as in Ms Schiavo's case, it's a different story: the structure to support mind had been there before but is now damaged irreparably, and mind has departed permanently. There's no possibility of reversing that.

We are back to what it means to be a human being, and theology is factually flawed as a guide for that. Theology insists that there is something called a soul, never demonstrated to be fact and with no evidence produced to support such a vague but convenient allegation, that is somehow different from mind. Theology insists, also conveniently, that this soul isn't tied to a specific physical location of the body — and yet it is present from the very moment of conception. Bullshit. If theology said otherwise, of course, it would be forced to contend with established realities in the physical world. Why anybody still gives theology credence over fact, I'll never know.

What I do know is that whenever religion attempts to make statements or predictions about the physical world — ranging from physical forces such as wind or rain being gods, to the Catholic Church's insistence that Earth is the center of the universe and the sun revolves around us rather than the reverse, with a lot of other nonsense in between — whenever we do this, Nature laughs and disproves it. We eventually learn better, and each time we do, religion has to give ground to fact. At some point, religion and its proponents resent that.

Only foolish people would give theology precedence over fact. But some of those fools have money and clout and can deliver votes — which is the only practical reason that the Republicans suck up to the religious far right. The true irony here is that in mindlessly following theology over fact, these people willingly surrender that most defining characteristic of our humanity that is the human mind: not that soul that nobody can demonstrate exists, but the overwhelmingly demonstrable capacity for sophisticated, rational thought. Something that they can choose to give up not because they have these alleged souls but precisely because they have human minds. Human consciousness, not animal.

And that's my epistle to the unbelievers for this sabbath.