Stop the Monsters

The Real Death Panels

2009-09-05T19:01:00.000-07:00

There's a disturbing story in the NYTimes today about how Wall Street is now buying and repackaging life insurance policies the way it did mortgages over the last decade. The author, Jenny Anderson, explores whether such financial products would similarly put investors at risk, and whether having such a market might entice the ailing and elderly to part with their potential payouts for too little in return.

But unseemly as the notion of Wall Street, fresh off its bailout, reprising a disastrous business model by again enticing the foolhardy to make bad financial decisions (buying a house you can't afford, or taking 40 cents on the dollar for your life insurance payout when you're likely to die soon), the author glosses over the far more sinister aspect:

Wall Street (and all its investors from pension funds to companies to individuals) will have an interest in seeing the sickly die.

This is because death triggers the payout, while extended life requires investors who bought the policy to pay in indefinitely. Anderson even touches on this peripherally in the piece:

A bond made up of life settlements would ideally have policies from people with a range of diseases — leukemia, lung cancer, heart disease, breast cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer’s. That is because if too many people with leukemia are in the securitization portfolio, and a cure is developed, the value of the bond would plummet.

So that means that hundreds of millions of dollars will be lost if cures for particular diseases are developed, thereby enabling people to live longer. Once an interest like that gets entrenched, it's lobbyists will do whatever they can to discourage medical innovation, healthy lifestyles and anything else that will devalue the investment. They will quite literally be profiting off of disease and death. And like our current health care industry (which helps create the world's 37th best outcomes at by far the greatest cost), it will fight and lie and do whatever it takes to perpetuate itself.

These are the real death panels - and they come not from the government but from a free market that's permitted to operate beyond the scope of its expertise and usefulness. In matters of sickness and health - and life and death - conscience rather than greed, should inform our policy.

Even if Wall Street hadn't destroyed our economy and profited from the bailout with such a similar scheme, this idea would be monstrous. That it's happening in the current environment is beyond nihilistic - it borders on a concept that one should not throw around loosely when talking about other human beings: evil.

Stating the Obvious

2009-08-31T09:52:00.000-07:00

Paul Krugman's latest NY Times Op Ed sums up the difficulty of getting decent policy out of Washington pretty well. Of course, as I wrote in the comments - which incidentally got a lot of recommendations (which means far more people read it than they do this blog):

Everyone with half a brain and a conscience knows this, but how can we act on it?

This is really the problem - so many educated, intelligent people are completely aware of what's going on - with corporate dollars creating disastrously unsustainable and unhealthy policy, but are not organized to do anything about it.

Of course, one thing we must do is put massive pressure on the media, calling out reporters and "journalists" by name who shill for power rather than speak the truth. Here's the whole post:

Everyone with half a brain and a conscience knows this, but how can we act on it? For one, it's time to go to war against a compliant media that has become a spokesman for whoever's in power. Your op-eds and Frank Rich's are great - and Glenn Greenwald is probably the best and most relentless of all. But aside for a handful of people telling the truth, the Times and other publications are still doing the: "Cheney claims that Holder's investigation is purely political." How about: "Cheney, desperate to avoid being outed as the architect of our illegal, counterproductive and murderous war interrogation policy, claims Eric Holder's decision to investigate as politically motivated." Why is even the Times afraid to print the facts? What in the above is in dispute? That people died, that it was a recruiting tool for the enemy, that it violated the Geneva conventions? Op Ed is great, but why are we not also reporting facts? Why does the news not begin with the premise that we violated international law, and then discuss whether elected officials should be exempt from it. Why are we arguing about whether it worked?

The health care debate makes me sick - I'm too angry to read another word about it because the Times (and it's far from the worst) does not speak the truth. It reports claims from one side and claims from the other. You and Frank Rich should resign in protest - publish an independent blog until they report the facts, not just take dictation from both sides.

The entrenched interests are unassailable only because the MSM refuses to tell the truth. If we didn't report "Death Panel" claims but instead said: "Senator Grassley lied yesterday in claiming..." then it things would be different. Adam Nagourney wrote a column about Palin's prospects for higher office in the future, and not once did he mention that she's unqualified. At what point do you show your readers respect and stop worrying about offending the guys who stupidly and blindly root for "their team." If the Giants are beating the Jets 40-0 in the fourth quarter, should sportscasters analyze the Jets playcalling: "Good time for the play-action fake here, Bob." When it's 40-0, the play calling doesn't matter. When a candidate is beyond a joke, how can you analyze her chances as if that's even a remotely acceptable possibility. How can you give that credibility?

Seriously, I appreciate these columns and Frank Rich's, but most of the political "reporting" is a total joke - even at the Times. The Washington Post is a complete disgrace - it's a cancer on the republic.

And while I wrote that in what I'd call a blind rage, and still agree with every word of it, I'm aware that just naming names and expressing our anger isn't enough. There must be some wider organization - campaigns to depose our current leaders who serve their corporate patrons instead of us, boycotts of businesses, voting for sustainable and uncorrupt ones every day with our dollars, etc. We must use every weapon in our arsenal to unravel our democracy from these insidious forces.

This is the "clash of civilizations" that must actually take place before peace and prosperity can be restored. Not some stupid, bigoted religious war against Muslims halfway across the world, but a war against the corruption in our own societies. We need to do our part here - forget about Iraq and Afghanistan. The way to keep us healthy and safe is to make good policy, and hold those who lie to and steal from the people in proper account - let alone the war criminals who greatly multiplied our enemies' numbers. Charles Grassley, Dick Cheney, Jim DeMint, Kent Conrad, Dianne Feinstein, etc. You are the more dangerous enemy, and you must be publicly discredited, ostracized and permanently and irrevocably barred from what you shamelessly call "public service".

Why Abandoning the Rule of Law to Avoid a "Political Food Fight" is the Height of Cowardice

2009-08-24T19:31:00.000-07:00

Initially, I thought President Obama should stay away from prosecuting Bush administration torturers because of the predictable way the media would portray it - as a partisan move that would distract from healthcare, getting the economy back on track and other important national priorities. But after reading Glenn Greenwald's blog over the past year or so, I've come around to his view that the rule of law cannot ever be subservient to political expedience lest the exception overwhelm the rule. If Bush admin officials committed war crimes, but should be let off the hook for political reasons, then by that same argument no one with sufficient power or popularity should ever be charged with a crime. The rule of law then applies only in cases where the accused is sufficiently powerless that few will be inconvenienced should he be brought to justice.

Aside from the transparent hypocrisy and immorality of this view, it also has long-term political ramifications. By refusing to endure the political discomfort brought about by prosecuting the powerful when they have broken the law, we will encourage increasing lawlessness by the politically connected until the system breaks. This is much like what happened in the financial industry after Enron collapsed - by not reforming the rules after corporations defrauded investors out of billions, we permitted the banks to defraud the taxpayers out of trillions. So even leaving aside the obvious moral argument, the Chuck Todd, avoid-political-food-fight politics is a long-term loser on its own terms.

But even if one is unconvinced letting the powerful off the hook for crimes will eventually lead to even more severe abuses - and we assume, as Todd does, that no matter how strong the moral case is for holding torturers accountable it pales in comparison to the likely political fallout - the question then is where does one draw the line?

Because in 1860, abolishing slavery required more than a political food fight. It was a fight with bullets and bayonets and one in which more American soldiers died than in any before or since. So if high-ranking officials should be allowed to torture and murder the innocent and guilty alike without consequences merely because of a potential political food fight, then slave owners should surely have been allowed to deprive their fellow man of even the most basic freedoms if the consequence of challenging that was our nation's bloodiest war.

When you think about it, Todd's dreaded political food fight - which might or might not happen and if it did to what extent it would actually derail our national priorities is pure speculation - is kindergarten stuff compared to the Civil War. But how many educated, thoughtful people, regardless of political affiliation, would rather we not have fought it? For Todd then (and perhaps Obama) to be willing to abandon the rule of law for fear of a food fight is cowardice beyond belief. If Chuck Todd were practicing what now passes for journalism in the 1850s, what are the chances he'd be for the abolition of slavery when the fallout would be a crippling Civil War? If Obama is unwilling to see justice done and human rights respected for fear the political fallout would be unpleasant, why even bother with the pretense of viewing Abraham Lincoln as a historical role model?

I instinctively trust Obama and believe he's a good man. But his refusal to fight for what is transparently right and just to anyone with even a quarter of his knowledge of constitutional law is deeply troubling. I hope that he's somehow still playing what Andrew Sullivan called "the long game", but the evidence for that is diminishing.

Why Fear of "Health Care Rationing" is Stupid and Disingenuous

2009-08-22T10:29:00.000-07:00

I can't think of a more disingenuous argument against the public option than that it will result in rationing. The idea is that the government's plan will only cover certain procedures and not others, (based on what some bureaucrats believe is necessary, cost-effective, etc.), and so some procedures will not be available. But that's false - every procedure will be available - it just won't be paid for by the government. In which case you have four options: (1) Buy a private plan instead that does cover the desired procedures; (2) Buy a smaller and cheaper private plan that is merely supplemental to your government one (of course, private insurance will look to fill any key gaps in the public one); (3) pay for non-covered procedures out of pocket or (4) don't get those procedures.

The idea that we don't want to government to take over because of rationing is contradictory. Either you think the government should ensure affordable health insurance, or it shouldn't. If it's the latter, then what do you care about rationing - as the government's supposed to pay for nothing anyway. Why would you then get worked up over it paying for less than everything?

If you're rich enough you'll always get great medical care. If you're not, you won't get everything you want. No matter what system we adopt, that will always be true.

Obama, Game Theory, Right, Wrong and Justice

2009-07-27T00:42:00.000-07:00

It seems the method to Obama's conciliatory style is basic Game Theory. According to Game Theory, compromises often provide the best net outcome for both parties even though the compromised outcome is never the optimal one for either. One example is the game of chicken, i.e., where you drive your car toward your opponent's car, and whoever swerves loses. Best case scenario, you go straight, your opponent swerves. Second best, you both swerve. Third best, you swerve first. Worst, neither of you swerve, and you both die in the crash.

To achieve the optimal outcome, you cannot swerve. Of course, by doing so, you risk the worst one. Obama's tack is to persuade people to settle for the second-best case scenario. By contrast the Bush administration seemed to want to step on the gas and convince its opponents that the steering wheel was broken, and swerving was not an option. Therefore its opponents would be left only with option three or option four. Of course, that only works when the opponent can be easily cowed like the congressional democrats. When dealing with Islamic militants, many of whom would prefer a cathartic crash, we were assured the worst - or second worst if we realized they were more committed than us and backed down in time.

But Obama will necessarily disappoint people who hoped for their optimal outcome. Overall, we can see why this is a good strategy because the outcome on average will likely be better than ones where everyone is dead set on winning. But what makes Obama's tack hard to take is not its outcomes but that compromise seems to proceed irrespective of right, wrong or justice. In other words, Obama will choose option 2, even if his side is absolutely right, and the other side is absolutely wrong. A good (if trivial) example is the Henry Gates incident with the Cambridge police officer.

When Gates, a black Harvard professor, was having trouble getting into his upscale home, a neighbor called the police to report a possible break-in. When the white police officer, Sgt. Crowley, arrived and questioned him, Gates became angry and insulted the officer. The officer ascertained Gates was indeed the owner of the house, but after Gates verbally got after him some more, Crowley cuffed Gates and brought him to the police station.

When asked about the incident, Obama said he didn't know all the details but that the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting a man in his own house for yelling at the cop who questioned him. This caused a major uproar, but what Obama said was true - irrespective of the other facts, if a cop arrests a man who's not a danger in his own home, that's stupid.

Due to the uproar, Obama later conceded that "stupid" was an unfortunate choice of words and called the officer to invite him for a beer at the White House. While settling for outcome 2 - both Obama and the Cambridge police swerve - is better than Obama and the police "crashing" into each other, it's unsettling that Obama made this compromise despite characterizing the interaction correctly.

This incident is so trivial that how he handled it does not trouble me too much, and the compromise can easily be filed under "you have to pick your battles." But it's indicative of a larger pattern whereby Obama will shoot for the best average outcome irrespective of what side is right or wrong. The concern here is the loss of justice. To take a far less trivial example, the Obama administration has so far refused to push for an investigation of Bush officials for possible war crimes even though there's ample evidence they violated the Geneva conventions and took part in torture. Again, letting that slide, "looking forward not back" might be less risky and damaging in the short run, but can we really settle for the second best option - no prosecutions, no political fallout - when the best option - justice, accountability, rule of law - is the right thing to do? In other words, at what point does Obama's conciliatory Game Theory optimization yield to bigger, universal truths?

The other side of the coin is this - and I've experienced this in my personal life with various girlfriends and even friends and colleagues: (1) just because you think you're right (or even are sure you're right) doesn't mean your adversary doesn't believe he's just as right; and (2) even if you are in fact right, it's often worth conceding to keep the peace, i.e., just because one is right doesn't mean insisting on one's rightness is the optimal course of conduct.

The hope is Obama's Game Theory tack operates only as a means to achieve optimal ends and not as an end in itself. In other words, one might have to settle for a suboptimal outcome in many battles, but only to ensure ultimately that justice triumphs in the overall war. Perhaps this is what he means when he quotes Martin Luther King, saying "the arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice." If not, then settling for the second-best outcome is not a sustainable strategy for achieving our most important priorities.

The Emperor Has No Clothes

2009-07-08T21:55:00.001-07:00

This post at The Anonymous Liberal sums up the Palin phenomenon to a tee.

The Other Reason the Old Media is Dying

2009-07-05T02:19:00.000-07:00

It's well known that the web has eaten into print circulation and advertising for newspapers and that cable news channels and the web have given consumers far more choices for news than the network options. But that's only part of the equation. The other is that the mainstream media just isn't very good at its job. Let's take a relatively benign example.

In Saturday's New York Times, writer Adam Nagourney writes an article entitled: "If White House Is Her Goal, Palin’s Route Is Risky". The purpose of the article was to assess Palin's chances of being elected president now that she's resigned from being Governor of Alaska.

Nagourney quotes a political strategist, a former White House political director and a former McCain adviser (among others) to analyze her prospects. Some think it's possible she can regroup, some think it'll be hard for her to expand her base, but nowhere in the article is there any mention that this woman *should not be* and *should never have been* a serious candidate for any government office. That is not merely my view; it's a fact. Whether I am qualified to play the oboe in the London Philharmonic or quarterback for the New York Jets is not merely a matter of opinion. Even if many people believe I would be great at both, it's simply, factually untrue. Andrew Sullivan has exhaustively documented why that's the case, and Palin herself validated Sullivan's views with this resignation speech, though they hardly required validating following the distastrous Katie Couric interview last fall.

But my point isn't to talk about Palin, but about how a New York Times front page article can analyze Palin's chances for the presidency without ever mentioning how disastrous it would be. It's like commenting on a football team's play calling when it's down 35 points in the fourth quarter. "It's second and six, and I think you'll see a little play action here, with the defense expecting a run." It's 35-0 - no one cares what kind of play they call! Analyzing the strategy without acknowledging the absurd context reveals you have no idea what's going on. I'll assume that Nagourney does realize what Palin is, but feels he must pretend she might one day be a legitimate presidential hopeful so as not to seem overly partisan or to inject his opinion into it. But by pretending that, he badly insults the intelligence of his readers. NFL announcers, many of whom are not particularly good at their jobs, either, would never analyze the play calling in that way during the fourth quarter of a blowout game. Even the worst of them have more respect than that for the audience. If there's a blowout going on, that fact is not somehow ignored because fans of the team will be upset if it were acknowledged.

As a result, newspapers and news channels which also operate under this policy of pretending obvious facts that make moot their whole analysis don't exist, are not offering compelling content. You can't stop technological progress, and you can't make some people pay for a print product that's available for free online, but you can offer useful content. And you can also communicate implicitly to your readers what you think of them. Writing columns about Palin's chances of a future run at the White House without acknowledging how wrong she is for the job, is horribly patronizing.

The crisis in the news business is not just one of solvency, but one of legitimacy. How can we possibly be expected to tune into sources that refuse to acknowledge the most pertinent facts? Until the MSM stops being afraid to offend or be criticized, they'll lose readers not only to new technologies, but also because most people really, desperately want to be told the truth.

Letter to Dianne Feinstein

2009-07-04T12:05:00.000-07:00

Copy of an email they probably won't read which I sent to their office:

Senator Feinstein:

If you do not support the public option for healthcare which a majority of Americans support and an even wider majority of the democratic constituents who elected you, I promise you no amount of health-care industry money will save your seat. And no amount of repentance will save your permanently and irrevocably tarnished legacy. I'm sorry to be harsh, but this is your job - to get a working health care system in place. Congress has not done it all these years, but with a democratic majority and Obama in the White House, there are no longer any excuses.

Americans like me do our jobs every day. That our government has this kind of fiscal deficit, but we're 37th in health care quality is nothing short of a disgrace. If you're not willing to take responsibility for fixing it, we will elect someone who will. It's a sad state of affairs where citizens like me have to write our senators just to get them to do their jobs. But make no mistake, we will do whatever it takes to make sure our deadbeat legislatures start representing us and not their corporate patrons.

I'm cc'ing my 23,500 blog readers on this as well and encouraging them to pass it on. (Okay, I exaggerated by 23,495 or so).

Very Truly Yours,

Christopher P. Liss
Independent Voter who volunteered for and donated to Barack Obama

What annoys me most about our elected representatives is they think being a senator is prestigious, something that makes you a big success, person of status, someone above the people. When in reality it should be just the opposite - you are now an employee of the people, a public servant. We pay your salary and, ironically, your health care expenses. I think it's important we continually remind them of the proper balance this relationship should have.

Debunking Arguments Against the Necessity and Efficacy of the Government Health Plan

2009-06-29T23:27:00.000-07:00

Before we get to the actual substantive arguments, I'd like to call attention to an often-used tactic, in this case by the shameless Diane Feinstein, who opined today that criticism from the left on healthcare "doesn't move me one whit" and who also has taken campaign contributions from the healthcare industry (though in fairness not nearly as much as some of her democratic colleagues in Congress. Feinstein said on CNN, “I don’t know that [Obama] has the votes right now. I think there’s a lot of concern in the Democratic caucus.” And that controlling costs of the new system is a “difficult subject.”

The idea is to convince us that the ship has already sailed, that though a a majority of Americans support the option of a public plan (and an even larger majority of her democratic constituents), the effort has already failed. You see this tactic used all the time. In the primaries, the Clintons tried to convince people that Obama would never win enough white male votes to get elected, so Hillary was the only option. Yes, we know you want Obama, but he's already lost. No use pining for what you can't have... So, here's Feinstein trying to portray the situation as something that's already failed because then there's nothing she could or should do about it. Ordinarily I'd do my job, but the task before me is impossible, or in any case, highly improbable, so you see, there's no point in getting upset about it. Of course, the left (and not merely the left), are upset about it. So Feinstein has a choice - either acknowledge the clearly-expressed will of her constituents, or like Ayatollah Khameni, declare the protesters insignificant. One wonders how disconnected a public servant is from her central mission when the public will is something to be dismissed.

But I digress - as the point of this post was to debunk bad arguments against the public health option. So above - we can't have a government option because it's too hard to pass is false. That's a determination to be made after the fact, not as an excuse for inaction beforehand. Everyone has challenges at work. This is your job, Senator Feinstein. Shut up and do it. Or as a friend of mine likes to say: "I don't want to hear about the pain - just show me the baby."

Second, the argument that the government can't run anything as competently as private for-profit industry. This is also patently false. Medicare's administrative costs amount to three percent of its budget - private insurance's more than 27 percent. Moreover, private insurers need to make a profit, the government just needs to break even. Our system of for profit insurance has resulted in the 37th best care in the world at the highest cost. Almost every country ahead of us, including the very top ones on the list, have some form of socialized care that costs less than ours and has far better outcomes.

Third, if we socialize healthcare, we'll become socialist. False. Our police and fire departments are socialized; so is our criminal justice system and our water supply. That doesn't mean you can't hire a security guard or buy bottled water. It does mean that many of our essential services are run by the government. Health care is an essential service.

Fourth, the free market is more efficient at setting prices for care than the government. This is false for two reasons (1) because one who needs an essential medical treatment isn't in a good position to bargain for a good price; and (2) because in many cases one lacks the expertise to determine whether a particular medical procedure is necessary. If the buyer has no choice but to buy no matter the cost, the market cannot possibly be efficient. And if the buyer lacks a proper basis to make an informed purchase, he's put in the position of trusting the seller to decide whether and how much he should buy. How anyone could possibly think such a system would be anything but disastrous to the American consumer is mind boggling. Health care is not like the latest electronic device where you are perfectly free to buy it or not buy it based on your financial situation and your personal priorities. You can also pretty easily grasp the pros and cons of owning that device on your own. In cases like that, the free market works perfectly well. Not so with healthcare.

Fifth, if the government's running health care, it'll put private health insurers out business. Might be true, might be false. Who cares? If it puts them out of business, then it proves the point that the government plan was a better deal. If it doesn't put them out of business, then it's false. Either way, it's not a serious objection. In fact, it's actually the point of the public plan - either to demonstrate the raw deal we're getting or to force the private insurers to come up with a fair one.

Sixth, turning insurance over to government and cutting costs will stifle innovation, e.g,, life-saving medical devices and drugs. Maybe, maybe not. Some of the biggest "innovations," e.g,, cholesterol lowering drugs, make a ton of money for the pharmaceutical companies, but do not significantly reduce the risk of heart disease. When profit is the chief motive for medical researchers, then they will do what most reliably yields a profit. Marketing drugs as life saving based on what they can do (lower cholesterol) is easier than to make drugs that actually save lives. Real innovation in any field is difficult. You can't just throw a billion dollars at Jerry Bruckheimer and expect him to make art with it. What you usually get is product, commerce. Something that can be marketed and sold. While it's not impossible for creative breakthroughs to happen while chasing the money (Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote many of his novels to pay off his gambling debts), it's the exception rather than the rule, and it's unclear that researchers motivated by smaller profits and something as pathetic as the good of mankind would fare worse.

Seventh, we can't afford it. This is the stupidest argument of all. First off, the current for profit system is what no one can seem to afford, least of all the federal government for which it's the biggest long-term liability. Second, if people don't get care, and remain sick, they'll continue to fill emergency rooms, costing more money than if they received timely treatment. Third, chronically sick people are unproductive in the workforce and drain otherwise productive family members who need to speed time caring for them. The cost in GDP of having substandard care for a substantial number of American workers must also be taken into account.

Never mind that treating the sick - rather than squeezing every last penny out of them and their families - is also the right thing to do.

Who Socialized the Water Supply?

2009-06-25T23:33:00.000-07:00

How are Arrowhead and Poland Spring expected to compete?

Obama is a Conservative

2009-06-25T22:58:00.000-07:00

When you get past the social issues that go in and out of favor with different parties (abortion being legal is actually an example of limited government and was not always anathema to conservatives) and consider conservatism as a posture toward governing, Obama is more conservative than his predecessor.

For starters, Obama believes in incremental rather than radical change. Even though he believes that single payer government run healthcare is how we'd do it if we started from scratch, he's going to work within our current system because he's sensitive to the impact dismantling the healthcare industry, however corrupt and incompetent, would have on the economy.

Even though the banks and the car companies were inept and reckless, he opted to bail them out because he did not want radical disturbances to ripple through the economy. On Iran, he showed restraint in not siding with one presidential candidate over another, but merely condemned the violence against peaceful protesters. In other words, he didn't not meddle or involve the United States in a conflict that on this occasion had nothing to do with us.

It would seem that being conservative (in its most positive sense) is to be humble and restrained. You are rightfully wary of radical change because you can't possibly know the outcome (unlike the neocons who arrogantly and wrongly assumed things would go smoothly after they invaded Iraq and dismantled its army). You act only out of necessity (as when the financial system nearly collapsed), but not out of choice. You regulate financial markets to ensure they serve their function - to grease the wheels of commerce, and so they don't devolve into casinos that produce short-term revenue but ultimately destroy long-term wealth creation.

Changing the health care system is also a move of necessity with long-term costs threatening to destroy our fiscal outlook and already bankrupting millions of citizens. Moreover, our outcomes are among the worst in the civilized world and our costs are the highest. To do so without starting from scratch is the conservative way to go about it.

There are times I wish he were far more radical and willing to take the hammer to the crooks in health insurance, banking and other corrupt industries that have stolen from the public for decades. I'd like to see him prosecute the Bush administration for torture and take on the corn lobby that helps poison our food supply. But if Obama were that guy, he would probably not have been elected president. And even though a more radical approach that emphasized instant justice would be more satisfying, its side effects and potential backlash are impossible to know.

If You Kill the Government Health Care Option I Will Make it My Mission in Life to Run You Out of Government

2009-06-08T20:50:00.001-07:00

Let me start by saying my health care plan sucks. It's a joke. For example, I need to have ankle surgery, but it doesn't cover rehab. Of course, anyone who has surgery needs rehab, but it's not covered. Moreover, the surgeon recommended trying rehab first, which I did, but stopped when I found out it wasn't covered.

The reason I have such a terrible plan is twofold: (1) It's cheap, and (2) I didn't have a better choice. Let me explain. For five years, I saw a doctor in his late 70s as my primary care physician. He was a decent man who genuinely cared about his patients, but in retrospect, I believe he was getting slightly senile. (He retired a couple years ago). I believe this doctor (in retrospect) was a bit panicky about certain harmless symptoms I had and wanted to put me on statins and other harmful medications I didn't need, which I refused. Except that when I went to change to a more comprehensive plan, they downgraded my status to Tier 4, based largely on that doctor's diagnoses. I appealed and lost, and so I had the choice of paying $500 a month for myself (I was 36 at the time with no known health problems other than torn ligaments in my ankle), or $79 dollars for a terrible plan (Tier 1 price). I chose the former, as I didn't want to give up my tier 1 status.

Now that I have a few other health problems, thyroid, adrenal glands, pre-diabetes, and still the chronically sprained ankle for which I am going to shell out $6000 in out of pocket costs for the surgery, I realize how meager the scope of my coverage is.

While there are many factors as to why health insurance is a joke in this country (from drug company lobbyists, to our poisonous food supply to the lack of preventative care), there's little doubt that the bloated infrastructure and big CEO paychecks of health insurance companies are a major one. If one is sick, one needs someone with knowledge (a doctor or nurse) and the best materials/medicine/technology for treatment. The costs of those two things are unavoidable. Throw in the rent for the doctor's office, the salary of the receptionists - that's all fine.

But why the fuck are we paying the salaries of the incompetent health care customer service, their office overhead, their marketing and advertising costs, their adjusters, their lawyers, their lobbyists, their management, including their wealthy CEOs? How did this slippery middleman weasel and connive his way into a huge piece of our paychecks in an area we have but no choice in?

It is quite easy to find doctors online. One does not need Blue Shield of California to provide a directory of doctors these days - one merely needs a bank of sorts, a pooler of risk that charges a very small vig for administration and processing.

That is why we need a government option - one that simply costs some taxpayer money and the only function of which is to pool risk, so that those with financially catastrophic problems are covered.

And if one wants still to keep his piece of shit private insurance, that's fine - keep it and continue as you were. Being foolish in your financial choices should always remain legal. But let's see how well these useless and outdated middlemen fare when they are no longer the only choice we really have. We will see the costs of insurance go down dramatically.

But the spineless "Blue Dog" democrats are now opposing the government option saying they will only support it if and after insurers fail to meet a particular set of goals. In other words, they will delay any real reform until after the insurance companies - the same ones under whom health costs have skyrocketed - get another chance to meet some benchmarks, which no doubt they are currently lobbying to set low. Only then should we consider giving people another option these "Blue Dog" dems argue.

Sorry, the time for those companies to provide a solution for us was in the last 15 years, and they have not. They had their chance, and the state and cost of health care have gotten substantially more expensive, more complex and arcane and flat-out worse. No one fucking likes our health care system. Not the patients, not the doctors and certainly not anyone with an eye on our long-term fiscal situation. It's over.

So you cowardly, unprincipled piece of shit representatives who have taken so much money from the health care industry

Jason Altmire: $405,279

Michael Arcuri: $103,547

Joe Baca: $159,250

Marion Berry: $536,917

Sanford Bishop: $356,496

Leonard Boswell: $304,680

Chris Carney: $167,664

Ben Chandler: $223,300

Jim Cooper: $894,414

Jane Harman: $292,694

Stephanie Herseth Sandlin: $323,924

Tim Holden: $386,278

Frank Kratovil: $86,556

Mike Ross: $833,670

Loretta Sanchez: $183,162

Adam Schiff: $380,708

Zach Space: $144,125

Charlie Wilson: $138,724

Mike Thompson: $631, 532 (His take from the health care industry, was second only to beer/wine/liquor business, which gave him $1,009,370)

if you stand in the way of an alternative to the status quo, I will make it my fucking mission in life to be absolutely sure you are removed from office and never work anywhere ever again until you repent and do something useful rather than destroy the well being of the very people whom you purport to represent.

And by the way, the next phase of health care reform will be to go after the drug company-funded studies that skew the results and help them sell billions of dollars worth of useless and often harmful drugs. There needs to be a truly independent board that puts the kibosh on that deeply corrupt and harmful practice. And finally, it needs to be made illegal - to the point of sanctions and the threat of losing one's medical license - for doctors to accept lunches and paid trips by these drug companies. Every doctor should take the time at least a few times a year to read up independently on new developments in his or her field (just like everyone does at every other job) and not rely on for profit salespeople to tell them what the latest and greatest medicines they're selling are while bribing them with gifts, meals and travel. It's a fucking disgrace that a person whose job it is to help other people heal from illnesses would ever be involved in that kind of transparently obvious corruption. But far from being the exception this is now the norm - as even doctors on the Harvard Medical School faculty are being paid to turn their students into pushers of product.

The bottom line, our current medical establishment is by and large as morally bankrupt and grossly incompetent as we recently discovered our financial one to be. The reason for the corruption is the same - that greed and short-term profit have caused systemic blindness to the facts and a callous indifference to the damage it does to the citizen that lives with it. While the financial sector, with a massive assist from the banking lobby which corrupted government, first created a great disparity in wealth between the rich and poor, then destroyed the pensions, home equity and the job security of millions while saddling everyone with a massive debt, the health care lobby is destroying what little we have left while giving us inferior and unaffordable treatment, resulting in avoidable illness and death. It, too, is our greatest long-term fiscal liability.

So getting a government option is mandatory now. And if you people on this list - you who purport to represent us - stand in the way, I will personally see to it that you're finished in government and that your reputation is permanently and irrevocably destroyed

Good Summary of the Obama-Cheney Debate

2009-05-21T22:44:00.000-07:00

Ann Telnaes hits the nail on the head in the Washington Post.

America's Detoxification Requires Patience and Perseverance

2009-05-21T16:14:00.001-07:00

I want to begin by saying I'm an enormous fan of Glenn Greenwald and that I wish everyone in Washington would read his blog. I cannot imagine someone doing a better job of speaking truth to power and calling out the sycophantic public relations people that pose as journalists in our mainstream media.

That said, I disagree with him that Obama is transforming "right-wing dogma into... bipartisan consensus" by permitting military commissions, failing to release photos and keeping detainees deemed dangerous locked up for the time being.

There are a couple issues here:

(1) If there is a sound basis for deeming a detainee dangerous, but because the Bush admin tortured him or otherwise didn't gather enough evidence of an actual crime, e.g., let's assume he was picked up on the battlefield in Afghanistan, surrendered, but during his stay in Guantanamo has vowed jihad on the US thousands of times, then what other choice does Obama have? If we try him, there's no way to convict, and if we release him, the man will immediately resume his aggression toward the US. I suppose Greenwald would have us try the man, and upon acquittal, deport him back to Afghanistan or elsewhere where he'd join up with the Taliban and fight our soldiers or plot against the US. I suppose this happens all the time in our civilian law enforcement when they have to release a suspect they're pretty sure is guilty because they don't have enough evidence to hold him. Except what would happen that suspect kept saying he would kill the sons and daughters of the police officers if they let him go? Would they still release him in that case? And should they?

(2) It's dangerous to detoxify too quickly or radically - the process of cleaning up the Bush admin mess (and our country's resultant disease) must be gradual.

Here's an analogy: if you have mercury poisoning (as I do), you have to chelate (take chemicals that bind to mercury and carry it out of the body). But if you take too big a dose, you will get much sicker because your body can't handle the mobilization of so much mercury at once. So you start off with very small doses, and carry bits of it out gradually - and your body, while still sick, can tolerate that amount of mobilization. As some of the mercury is removed, you can start to up your dose as you're less sick and more able to tolerate larger mobilizations without debilitating side effects. Finally, you're able to tolerate high doses of the chelator and clean out the rest.

So it's not just a cost-benefit analysis - is it worth unjustly imprisoning people to avoid unpleasant political consequences (Greenwald's framing of how Obama sees it), but you can actually jeopardize the whole chelation program by overdoing it too quickly. We were a very poisoned country, and our media and many elected pols (and a large number of misinformed citizens) can't handle a massive mobilization just yet. But as the body politic grows healthier, the tolerance will go up, eventually culminating in justice. But you have to be very careful not to push too fast, and Obama understands this because he's been "chelating" in communities for years and knows how to calibrate the pace of change and overcome resistance.

Greenwald's not so much interested in that because it's not his job to be. It's his job to keep the pressure on the administration to bring the country in line with the constitution. And to that extent he's correct to push for our ultimate and complete detoxification. Those who would argue that we should just move forward without accountability are like ill-informed doctors who think any suffering from mercury mobilization is too much for the fragile patient, i.e, that the patient is far too sick to chelate and should just treat his symptoms going forward. However, this will lead to all kinds of chronic degenerative diseases, so it is imperative to suffer a tolerable amount of discomfort and chelate at low doses immediately.

So the sick body-politic must tread a middle ground between too rapidly exposing itself to all of its existing toxins at once and not moving forward with Greenwald's ultimate goal - to realign the nation with the rule of law and the constitution.

CIA's Weak Arguments Against Interrogation Memo Disclosure

2009-04-14T22:46:00.000-07:00

Curious Wall Street Journal article on the CIA interrogation memo release debate.

Among the CIA's arguments to withhold the memos:

Intelligence officials also believe that making the techniques public would give al Qaeda a propaganda tool just as the administration is stepping up its fight against the terrorist group in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

If they tortured, then it's not a *propaganda* tool for al Qaeda, it's actually based in fact. Propaganda implies they're making up falsehoods about us. And since everyone believes that torture took place - otherwise why not release the memos - then the CIA is essentially admitting it was abetting al Qaeda recruiters through its misguided policy.

That's why they also argue:

But top CIA officials and some in the White House argue that disclosing such secrets will undermine the agency's credibility with foreign intelligence services.

Yes, it already has. But you can't embarrass and harm the interests of your country, then argue when called to account that doing so would embarrass and harm the country's interests.

You shouldn't be able to use a crisis of your own creation to excuse yourself from justice.

It is strikingly similar to what the banks did, though isn't it - they lobbied for changes in the law to make bad practices legal, damaged our economic security and claimed we had to spare them their natural reckoning because of the crisis they created.

The difference is that we know what banking laws and regulations were stripped. What agreed-upon protections and international safeguards were stripped by the CIA?

Terrible Washington Post Column

2009-03-14T12:57:00.001-07:00

In a piece entitled Obama's New Tack: Blaming Bush the writer Scott Wilson passes along the GOP talking point that Obama's statement of the obvious - that he inherited a fiscal disaster - somehow violates his pledge to move beyond recriminations.

Let's leave aside that a key Republican talking point is to try preposterously to pin our financial problems on Obama rather than Bush, and Obama is merely responding to that. In other words, that he's merely responding to lies. The more pertinent point that the column totally misses is that Obama is merely stating a fact when he says he inherited this disaster. To say that Bernie Madoff swindled people out of their money and caused many to have personal financial disasters is also a fact and not the type of recrimination that Obama pledged to avoid.

Obama pledged to move beyond recriminations based on political philosophy - matters of *opinion*. We should not be recriminating the other side merely for disagreeing with us. That was the point. Not to stop pointing out facts, misdeeds, mismanagement and crimes. That Wilson completely misses this distinction is incompetent at best and corrupt at worst. Or maybe it's the other way around.

Most Lopsided Debate Ever

2009-02-27T21:46:00.000-08:00

(Hat tip: Andrew Sullivan)

Best Award Speech Ever

2009-02-22T14:45:00.000-08:00

Too bad this would never happen at the Oscars.

One Benefit of the Financial Crisis

2009-02-22T02:10:00.000-08:00

A couple years ago, at the height of the market, some new companies entered into my industry (the fantasy sports industry). They were funded by investment (I think venture capital money), and they spent a whole bunch of it hiring people and marketing themselves. They made a nice splash at the conventions because they'd sponsor events and they'd spend money on advertising with other companies. Sure, they had a business plan of sorts, but not a realistic one given the amount of people they hired and the amount of money they were burning through.

Having seen a number of these outfits come and go, it occurred to me that in a good economy, one where there's plenty of extra money lying around, all it really all it takes is someone who is good at pitching investors to create these pseudo businesses. They raise money, throw it around, act like big shots, spend their way into a modicum of market share, then, if the economy's still good, ask for more money; if it isn't, they fold.

One beneficial side effect of a bad market is the elimination of these kinds of entities. It might seem like an industry is losing jobs or productivity, but it's not. I wonder how much of the loss in GDP in a recession is really just the elimination of this kind of bogus activity.

Why the Bailout Doesn't Matter

2009-02-22T01:48:00.000-08:00

I was getting worked up earlier about the idea that we're bailing out these incompetent scumbag bankers, auto company managers and delinquent home owners, but now I realize that it's much ado about nothing.

No money is coming out of my pocket presently, and the inflation created by the bailouts is not going to be a problem any time soon. So the real issue is that we, the taxpayers, are going to owe all of this on the back end. Just as Wall Street had its pyramid scheme which wound up with homeowners and banks holding the bag while the execs drained out all the money, we're just adding another layer to the pyramid with the taxpayers taking over for the banks. No problem, when we're asked to pay, we'll just do what the banks did - throw up our hands and say we're unable. At that point, there won't be anyone left to borrow from, and so the government and the world order will simply collapse. Which is what would probably happen now if we didn't give our money to the banks.

So we're buying a little extra time, pretending we can actually guarantee all that debt. Might as well enjoy it while it lasts. Because after the collapse - who the hell knows?

Talk Radio Viruses

2009-02-19T22:50:00.000-08:00

I just caught most of Right America: Feeling Wronged, and what struck me most was that the people were repeating talking points they had obviously heard somewhere - most likely on the radio. But not just repeating, but doing so with genuine emotion attached, and believing what they were saying as if it were the most obvious truth.

And it got me thinking that Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and the rest were able to infiltrate these people's beliefs by mimicking their thought patterns, speaking to their common fears and grievances, articulating actual feelings they have, then once hooked, steering them to a particular narrative, e.g., Obama's a socialist.

It's like a virus that tricks your immune system by mimicking it. Limbaugh will mimic the listeners' thought patterns, and once their attention and trust is hijacked use whatever normal skeptical and critical faculties they have against those speaking the truth. So if you say to one of his believers - actually, Obama's a capitalist and his tax plan just differs in terms of what bracket pays what, their skepticism, i.e., their immune system against falsehood, will immediately kick in and dismiss it. Instead of the healthy skepticism fighting bullshit, it's been subverted to fight the truth.

I don't know the long-term consequences of having 10s of millions of people with inverted critical faculties - in the near term it was Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld/Alberto Gonzalez, etc. - but I doubt they're good.

Kellogg Drops Michael Phelps

2009-02-06T11:09:00.000-08:00

Kellogg, the maker of Pop Tarts, Frosted Flakes and a hundred other high-fructose corn-syrup snacks and pseudo foods marketed to children amidst an epidemic of childhood obesity and diabetes and out of control national health care costs, is dropping Phelps? If the executives at Kellog were as good at their jobs as Phelps is at his, every child in America would be obese, and not just the one third that's the case today.

Saving the Newspaper Business

2009-02-05T17:05:00.001-08:00

In the New York Times Opinion section today, there's an article discussing the possibility of micropayments as a source of revenue for newspapers.

Essentially, you'd pay a penny for an article or a nickel for an hour of access to a web site, or something like that, and over time that $30 per month you'd spend would fund that paper's journalistic endeavors. But who's got an extra $30 or $50 or $100 a month to pay for that stuff these days? Not enough people to support all but niche subscription sites.

The key to making the micropayment work is to get the payment from the ISP, not the user. Think about it: Cable companies pay millions of dollars to their content providers like ESPN or the Discovery Channel so that they have those channels to to offer subscribers. Why would we be paying both our ISP AND for the content we can get by getting online?

Since our shortsighted and stupid ISPs would never do this (remember, these were the greedy morons who wanted to charge extra for optimal web surfing speeds), what needs to happen is this:

Google realizes that its quest to organize all the world's information is compromised by a lack of quality investigative reporting and journalism. It also realizes that the current ISPs are greedy and shortsighted. So it commissions (with the blessing of the Obama administration) a nationwide network of high speed wireless service *for free*. At this point, everyone paying $30-$60 per month for high speed access now has extra money to be charged a micropayment calculated by Google.

If you scroll down in the Times article above, you'll see that the primary objection to micropayments is that the user will have to go through the trouble to decide whether a given article or link is worth two cents. That wouldn't be an issue if Google added it up for you and sent you the bill - likely $20-$25 per month, less than you're currently paying for access. Google would also sell far more ads and would be hugely profitable. (In the interest of avoiding a Google monopoly, perhaps another company (Microsoft or someone else could offer wireless access in many areas as well).

Problem solved - Newpapers get their revenue, users still pay the same or less for high speed access, and Google/Microsoft/Yahoo get their cut for administrating it and also by selling ads.

The big loses are the telecom companies, no longer charging us for use of their "pipes".

But they had it coming.

Can the Problem of Executive Pay Be Reduced to a Logical Fallacy?

2009-02-05T12:29:00.001-08:00

It's well known that executive pay has gone up dramatically relative to the wages of ordinary workers the last 20-30 years, but that in and of itself doesn't mean our current system is wrong. It might be politically problematic, and it might seem unfair, but that's a separate question from whether those executives, particularly the CEOs, deserve their comparatively enormous salaries based on value and merit.

It seems the most basic argument in favor of CEOs receiving outsized paychecks is the "but for" one. But for my being here, the company wouldn't have made x billion dollars in profits. If the last CEO were here, it would have made y billion. So I should get a significant share in x-y billion dollars.

First off, it's hard to know for sure what the former CEO would have done, or more pertinently, an average CEO. But assuming the current CEO were correct, and the company made $8 billion instead of $4 billion that year, shouldn't he be entitled to a bonus of some percentage of the $4 billion extra, say 5 percent? If that were the case, he'd be making an extra $200 million.

Assuming for a moment that the company's profits were sustainable, and the CEO's efforts helped foster long-term growth and not merely growth on paper to boost the annual numbers, I'd still argue that the CEO likely does not deserve such a large cut even if the average CEO would have only produced $4 billion in profits.

That's because the CEO is merely a "but for" cause of the company's enhanced earnings, and not by any means the sole or even primary cause. The company was obviously poised to post phenomenal earnings given proper leadership, and the CEO provided that leadership. But had the company not been amenable to such improved growth, the CEO wouldn't have been able to make the difference.

To use a sports analogy - some teams will win a title only if you hire a great coach. And some won't no matter who is coaching. That a great coach takes a capable team to the title doesn't mean the coach is solely responsible. He is a but for cause. Accordingly, while the coach deserves credit and higher pay than a mediocre one, the team he inherited must also be taken into account.

The idea that a particular executive is worth whatever they have to pay him because without him the company would be doing far worse is a false one. The executive would also be doing far worse without a company amenable to such tremendous growth.

I'm Getting Fucked

2008-11-11T18:18:00.000-08:00

There's been a lot of talk about bailing out homeowners so they can stay in their homes and bailing out the auto industry so they can keep people employed and bailing out Wall Street so it won't collapse the economy. (Turns out some of that bailout money is going toward bonuses). But what about the renter who in the face of a huge housing bubble acted responsibly and didn't buy something he could only afford if prices went up indefinitely, and instead put his money into the stock market? Not only did I miss out on the housing bubble, but I'm also missing out on the bailout. In the meantime, I lost 60 percent of my net worth when the burst housing bubble killed the stock market! Where's my bailout? Oh, bailing me out isn't important because I was responsible and will still buy goods and keep the economy going even if I don't see a dime of it.

This really is socialism when car companies produce shitty cars that are bad for the environment, and we bail them out. When bankers take irresponsible risks and we bail them out. But citizens who paid their taxes and their bills and acted conservatively with their money - we're getting fucked. It's a transfer from the responsible to the greedy and the needy without our consent.

Get Michael Pollan a Cabinet Post

2008-11-06T22:06:00.000-08:00

Of all the problems facing us today, the destruction of our food supply by corporations and government lobbyists is probably the easiest to fix and one that might have the broadest consequences. As Michael Pollan has written about in his book In Defense of Food, the modern food industry has run roughshod over our eating traditions, and the results have been catastrophic. We're so worried about making health care universal and/or affordable, but we would need only a fraction of it if we just ate properly. But we don't eat properly because our food system is designed for quantity, addiction and profit rather than quality, health and taste. Pollan refers to numerous studies done on the Western diet's affect on people from native populations who had almost zero incidence of heart disease, cancer and diabetes before adopting it. They found that as soon as people adopted our eating habits, they got our diseases.

What's worse, our medical industry works hand in hand with the food industry, creating treatment for symptoms, but rarely addressing the underlying problem. So people take statins for the heart disease they have because they eat processed grains that flood them with too many Omega-6 fatty acids and inflame their systems. Instead of getting off the fake food and eating more organic fruits, vegetables and grass-fed meat, people continue with the Western diet and pay into the health care system. The medical profession has a vested interest in keeping us coming back for more treatment, and the drug companies lavish our doctors with unethical perks to persuade them to prescribe their products.

The good news is that it's an fairly easy solution - educate people to eat properly (not as per the AMA's faulty recommendations - they were part of the war on fats, and actually encouraged transfat consumption over natural products like butter), and watch the need for and cost of health care diminish to a fraction of what it is currently. The main obstacle to educating people on their health is that there's tremendous profit in having us eat processed foods. After all, you can patent the formula to Coca Cola, but you can't patent organic peaches. And growing organic takes more effort, and is harder to do on a large scale. But it's important not only because pesticides are harmful, but also because anything that artificially kills pests and diseases breeds produce that didn't have to develop the defenses itself. And many of the antioxidants that product against cancer and lower the risk of heart disease develop in plants to defend against bacteria themselves.

So there is an enormous vested interest in keeping us buying food from a box and also in using harmful chemicals that deprive us of essential nutrients. To that end, there are companies who commission studies designed to show that pesticides aren't harmful, and who hire lobbyists who make sure the laws on what can be sprayed on food and what can be run off into the environment are lax.

But if the population became truly educated about what they ate, they could vote with their dollars at farmer's markets and collectives - they could grow extra food in their back yards, they could swear off the fast food, and the food from a box. Moreover, they could make it known to their representatives that they want the food (and drug) companies to be held to high standards, and bloggers could call out the worst offenders and disseminate information to the public at large.

But just as President-elect Obama encouraged people to get involved in his campaign by creating a movement for change and setting up the infrastructure, he could also speed up this process of education about health vastly by enlisting his support, encouragement and network. With two foreign wars, a massive financial crises and huge entitlement liabilities, this might seem like a low priority, but it's not. It would solve the health care problem within a couple years by cutting the cost enormously. It would also have an enormously beneficial effect on the work force - people would be energetic healthy and productive - and it would be hugely beneficial to the environment. And there would not need to be a major outlay of cash.

Now that we're only beginning to understand fully the ways in which Wall Street and other corporate interests gambled with our pensions and retirement accounts to rack up huge profits before needing a bailout, it's important to go further and realize that the food and drug industry are doing the same in matters of nutrition and health.

So get Michael Pollan a cabinet post - (or at least a meeting) with our new president.

Obama's Strategy on FISA

2008-07-03T19:18:00.000-07:00

Was debating with a friend about Obama's support of FISA - I think no big deal, he thinks it undermines Obama's credibility entirely.

But then I started thinking about why Obama would support FISA since he had to know it would get MoveOn and their ilk up in arms. And then it dawned on me that's precisely WHY he did it. What better way to appeal to the center and center-right than to say: "The far right AND far left are both angry with me." In other words, it's not about FISA or telecom immunity at all. It's about sacrificing a relatively small issue to generate the backlash from the left he needs. It's like microfracture surgery - the doctor scrapes the bone to cause bleeding and create scar tissue to cushion the joint. He's scraping the left just enough to cushion his reception with a significant portion of the electorate outside his base.

It's not his centrist stance on FISA that will win him votes. It's that he doesn't look quite so beholden to the left.

I think that's a good rebuttal to all the pundits who try to argue that supporting the FISA compromise and tacking to the center substantively won't help. No it won't, but their overheated criticism surely will!

When given the choice between believing that Obama is tone deaf and doesn't realize what's obvious to the left-wing pundits, or believing that this black man with a Muslim name who is the frontrunner for president of the United States is playing the game at a more subtle level than they can even fathom, I'll go with the latter. These people are like financial pundits slagging Warren Buffett's stock picks. If Obama weren't the smartest guy in the game, we wouldn't even know who he was.

Send In The Lorax

2008-06-15T09:10:00.000-07:00

Because the California Bar Exam is only weeks away, I don't have time to do a proper post. But I did want to take a minute to note the disgusting irony of the Bush administration declaring polar bears a threatened species as a result of global warming, and only a month later issuing what are in essence grants of immunity to oil companies searching for oil and gas off northwestern Alaska.

In addition to the obvious link between oil/gas and global warming, the regulations provide five years of legal protections for the named companies if Pacific walruses or the 'threatened' polar bears are harmed by the companies drilling or pipeline activities.

Guess declaring a species to be threatened doesn't imply we want the threats to cease.

Victims Forever

2008-06-10T10:53:00.001-07:00

There are a lot of reports of Clinton supporters pledging to support John McCain this fall. This is ironic for a few reasons.

First, they know that McCain would almost certainly appoint a pro life justice to the Supreme Court in the next four years, likely overturning Roe v. Wade, something that's supposedly dear to Clinton and certainly most feminists.

Second, Obama's policies are almost identical to Clinton's substantively, and McCain's are virtually opposite. This shows that the decision to abandon Obama is largely emotional - and is most likely driven by a feeling that somehow Hillary was wronged, or cheated out of the election. This idea of Hillary's victimhood first at the hands of an unfaithful husband and then by a right-wing attack machine and finally a sexist press and an unfair primary process, the latter ideas stoked by Clinton herself, has driven some supporters to reject Obama - even though he hasn't done anything sexist and certainly won fair and square despite long odds.

But the final and most striking irony is that because of this, some Clinton supporters are pledging to vote for McCain who abandoned his first wife (who had been disfigured in a car accident) for a younger, healthier woman! I mean of all the people to support - these lost Clinton supporters are choosing someone who actually ditched and cheated on his wife to punish Obama, who is by all accounts faithful to his!

Think about that for a moment - all those people who identify with Hillary as a victim are voting for a victimizer to spite a man whose campaign for the most part took the high road. It's almost as if they resent Obama's lack of identification with black victimhood more than McCain's willingness to overturn Roe v. Wade and his abandoning his wife because she was no longer attractive.

But I suppose that's what the mentality of victimhood is - not merely someone who's been wronged, but one who ensures that the wrong repeats itself and perpetuates one's identity as a victim. And come to think of it, Obama's more of a threat to their identity than McCain is. Obama is a counterexample to them - he shows there's another way to proceed. McCain is the other side of the same coin - he commits the outrages that they feed on. So if McCain gets elected, they can continue to whine and complain. If Obama gets elected, and asks blacks to rise above victimhood, those women are going to have to go along, too - or look feeble and pathetic by contrast. What a nightmare - to have to take responsibility for your own lives!

Clinton Should Not Get Help for Her Campaign Debt

2008-06-10T10:30:00.000-07:00

The NYTimes reported today that Clinton has a debt of about $21 million and talks about her options for retiring it, one of which was raising more money from her supporters, another of which was having Obama's supporters help raise money. Both options strike me as ridiculous.

First off, the Clintons' net worth was more than $100 million before the campaign started. Why should people struggling to make ends meet give them a dime? (I'd presume most people who aren't struggling gave the $2300 maximum). The Clintons can retire the debt personally and still have $75 million or so in the bank, with plenty more to come now that Bill's free to continue speaking and having other undisclosed business dealings.

The idea of Obama supporters giving Clinton money is laughable. Clinton was throwing good money at bad long after her only hope for winning was an Obama meltdown. While people have given her credit for "grit" and "determination," in most other endeavors this would just be considered poor judgment - racking up debt in pursuit of a lost cause. And that's fine if she's going to take responsibility for that poor judgment and pay for it out of pocket. But to ask people for money in a bad economy to free her from its consequences is bad form.

The one option not discussed that I'd find reasonable is not to pay Mark Penn the millions he's owed, and when he sues her, to countersue for malpractice - after all, not only did he run a terrible campaign, he was on the Columbian government's payroll, lobbying for a trade deal that Clinton was criticizing. That's a conflict of interest that might void the obligation.

Rehabilitation for Hillary Clinton

2008-06-07T16:08:00.000-07:00

This post by "Sean" on FiveThirtyEight.com pretty much articulated my feelings toward Hillary Clinton to a tee.

He wrote this before she made her speech, which ever-so-slightly exceeded my expectations of what she would actually do, but surely fell short of what Sean would deem necessary for her rehabilitation. I tend to agree with him.

The argument is that Clinton poisoned Obama's image in the minds of her supporters by acting like his campaign was dirty, sexist and disrespectful. So even though she's ostensibly thrown her support behind Obama and asked her faithful to do the same, she's done so without healing the perceived wounds. In other words, her supporters still believe that she (and by extension they) were somehow wronged by the process. In that case, they might feel that Hillary has to do this because she's being bullied by Howard Dean, Nancy Pelosi et. al., but that they have still been wronged.

Therefore Sean's argument was for Clinton to heal those wounds by acknowledging that the outrage and emotion she stirred up in her followers were based on lies. And that she wasn't robbed, nor were FLA and MICH and that Obama's not by any means an elitist or a Muslim or a sexist. And that her campaign was the one fighting dirty, while his largely took the high road.

If she were to come clean about that, Sean argues, then maybe, possibly, he could see her in a different light.

But she didn't. And so now it's left to Obama himself to reach out to her supporters, and that's going to be far more difficult because she didn't come completely clean.

The more I think about it - it seems that this really isn't over, and she might, over the next six months, subtly undermine him with an eye on 2012. I hope I'm wrong - and that this wasn't a calculated half measure - but instead the best that she could do given who she is.

Get Lost Carl Icahn

2008-06-06T23:22:00.000-07:00

I don't know a whole lot about the business of large company mergers and proxy fights, but it strikes me that Icahn should mind his own business and leave Yahoo and its board alone. Who is Icahn - some entitled billionaire who feels the need to buy a large stake and force yahoo to sell Microsoft? Apart from Yahoo shareholders, who stand to see their stock get a bump in the short term, who does that really benefit? Do we need more consolidation of the search business at the top? Are consumers really that ill-served by Google's dominance of the search market? How so?

My only experience with Yahoo is in our business dealings with them at RotoWire, and they're one of the best, easiest and least pretentious big companies we deal with. It would be a shame if they were sold to a company widely reviled as a bully that puts out a mediocre product.

Short-term shareholder value shouldn't be the be-all, end-all of business. I own Yahoo shares, and I don't care about the short-term profit I'd get if Icahn's plan were to go through. I'd rather see the company stay independent.

Perhaps I'm naive here, but hearing Icahn rip Yahoo's management and try to force them to accept Microsoft's since withdrawn takeover bid rubs me the wrong way. What does he even care? The guy is a billionaire already - what good does this do? As usual in mergers, people will lose jobs, and sometimes that's necessary in situations where the underlying business makes no sense, or the merger is highly beneficial to both companies. In this case, Yahoo doesn't want to merge, unless they're blown away by the offer, so why force it?

Getting Views on YouTube

2008-06-02T23:57:00.000-07:00

I recently uploaded a six-minute excerpt from my feature length documentary, and I figured by sending it out to all of my friends and business colleagues, as well as posting it on the RotoWire blogs I'd get enough traffic for the clip to go viral. I was wrong - at least for now, and the clip is stuck at about 885 views with more trickling in slowly each day. This was a far cry from the 200,000 I had hoped to get in order to attract the attention of potential distributors.

So I did some looking around the web to find good sites to send the clip to, better search tags to add to it and whatever else I hadn't thought of. And I found this site, Tech Crunch, which no doubt offers sound advice if boosting your views is your main objective.

Suggestions on Tech Crunch include: logging in under many different YouTube usernames and generating fake commentary about your own clip, logging onto message boards with several different usernames and getting into heated discussions about your own clip, etc.

And I thought this was funny because I was feeling guilty at clicking on the video from different browsers and thereby generating multiple page views myself. My naive idea had been that my clip and documentary were actually good, and so once I sent it out to a few hundred people, naturally they would forward it along, and it would blow up. But Tech Crunch pointed out that:

There are tens of thousands of videos uploaded to YouTube each day (I’ve heard estimates between 10-65,000 videos per day). I don’t care how “viral” you think your video is; no one is going to find it and no one is going to watch it.

And so you have to game the system to get your video to the top of YouTube or onto key lists where it will be recognized. Which I thought about doing for about 10 seconds and then rejected. It's fake! It's cheating. It's fundamentally not merit based.

But what if through cheating you're able to get something you genuinely believe is good and worked very hard on for years into public view. Surely, the end justifies the means?

It's a fair argument, but I just can't get behind it. Pretending people like your clip is bad for the system, and while plenty of other people do it, it's fundamentally because they lack faith in their creative ability and their ability to adapt and market in an honest way. I'd be thrilled for instance if some big-time blogger picked it up and it spread that way. The key is that people send it along because they genuinely enjoy it.

Sundays Are for Football

2008-06-02T23:52:00.000-07:00

Excerpt from the 68-minute feature length documentary on the Hollyweird Fantasy Football League.

Letter to the NY Times re: Clinton's Kennedy Gaffe

2008-06-01T14:29:00.000-07:00

While friends of mine worried that this unstable person would destroy the democratic party in her own pursuit of power, I reassured them that like Eight Belles at the Kentucky Derby, she would push it too far, and her campaign would have to be euthanized on the track. I didn't foresee this specific gaffe - only that as her hopes dimmed, the inner sociopath would emerge, and that all but her most committed supporters, people who were dug in beyond all reason would jump ship. The folks at Slate.com compared her to Reese Witherspoon's Tracy Flick in "Election," but I always felt the far more apt analogy was to Gollum in "The Lord of the Rings." "The ring is mine!" she seemed to say with every outrageous tactic and divisive maneuvering.

It seemed so strange that the NY Times and other mainstream media didn't see what was so apparent to so many. Perhaps Frank Rich saw it, and Andrew Sullivan at the Atlantic, but so many others kept saying: "We have two great candidates" no matter what kind of campaign she ran, no matter what kind of vitriol her petty and vindictive advisors and increasingly unhinged husband shouted. The Times endorsed this person, and didn't retract it in the face of so much evidence. And now, it's plain as day, thankfully, but this was there all along.

Whether people out of political correctness due to the historic nature of her campaign didn't want to point out that the empress had no clothes, or whether people were really that cynical about politics to be duped into believing that just about anything goes, it's hard to say. But, and I've made this point many times - just because she's a woman does mean she's not a sociopath, and her supporters do a disservice to the many genuinely wonderful female candidates who will surely come after her by sticking with her this doggedly. Clinton and her supporters are making it more difficult for female candidates to get their due by allowing identity politics to cloud their character judgment. As Martin Luther King dreamt, people will one day be judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin, and I believe the same thing can be said about the configuration of their chromosomes.

Surely we only want a quality African American candidate like Obama, and just are surely we want a decent female candidate, not just the first available one.

May Clinton's campaign rest in peace, and may we look forward to a female president whose ambition is balanced by decency and integrity.

Just Say Yes: The Moral of the Bush Legacy

2008-06-01T12:59:00.000-07:00

One unintended moral of the Bush presidency is that for certain people, it's better to booze hard and snort cocaine than to get clean and find Jesus. Because had Bush remained a fuck-up, he would merely have destroyed his own life and hurt his loved ones. Instead, he got clean, and 4,000 US soldiers and half a million Iraqis are dead.

If the ghost of Christmas past came down and showed George Bush his alternate life - one where, homeless, he pisses himself on a park bench before expiring quietly, and meanwhile, the United States is prosperous, and the world a safer place - I think he'd be morally obligated to go back and choose that fate.

Obama's Deft Handling of Sociopaths

2008-05-31T14:02:00.000-07:00

People wonder how Obama would deal with a sociopathic enemy in Iran or elsewhere - I think we'll have a good idea over the next couple weeks. McCain and Obama can trades barbs in the press all they like, but how he's handling the Clinton campaign right now is the best evidence. Even though it's ridiculous to count ANY of the FLA or MI delegates (Clinton agreed to the rules, and Obama wasn't even trying in those states), he's going to compromise anyway (even though it's unjust and wrong) because it appeases the people of those states whose emotions the Clintons have destructively and selfishly stirred up. BUT - without jeopardizing his overall goal in the bigger picture of securing the nomination. In other words, Obama will negotiate with dictators, even legitimize them if he has to, but always with the big picture in mind: the safety and prosperity of America's citizens.

Imagine if in Iran, they chatted with Ahmadinejad, showed Iran some ostensible respect and in so doing quietly wooed the disgruntled Iranian population further and further toward our side. The Iranian people are what's important - just like the voters in MI and FLA. The Clintons are merely an obstacle to be worked around just like Ahmadinejad. The mistake Bush and McCain make is that their disgust with Ahmadinejad causes them not to do what's necessary to reach out to the citizens of the "enemy" who we ultimately need on our side. Obama doesn't let his distaste for Clinton and her unjust behavior get in the way of getting the outcome he needs.

Instead of fearing that Obama will be outsmarted by Ahmadinejad (and Bush has truly been in every way as Iran's influence has grown immensely on his watch), let's trust him to outsmart him the way he has with Clinton.

Incidentally, I sent this as an email to one of my favorite political bloggers, Andrew Sullivan, and he actually posted it.

And then my ESPN buddy (one of the two best writers there along with Bill Simmons), Jonah Keri mentioned it in his blog. My readership just jumped from zero to two.

Great Nature Video

2008-05-11T18:31:00.000-07:00

Saw this in Andrew Sullivan's excellent blog.

McCain Will Drop Out

2008-05-11T18:23:00.000-07:00

I know it seems like a long shot now, but here's what's going to happen. Hillary Clinton will hang around too long, and exit the race ungracefully. All but her most diehard supporters will finally realize what a sociopath she is and happily embrace Obama. He'll build on the enormous network that he has in place, and he'll take on McCain directly.

McCain is already having trouble getting his facts straight on Iraq and the economy, and he'll soon be behind by double-digits. McCain's advisers will mount an increasingly negative campaign, but it will backfire. Obama will demonstrate strength and command of the facts in their debates. McCain will embarrass himself, and Obama will show him compassion and respect. McCain's aides will insist that they need to smear Obama with more Reverend Wright/William Ayers/muslim associations, and McCain will say no. They'll tell him that's his only shot, and McCain, still a man of integrity despite his recent pandering, will bow out.

It will infuriate the right who will say they knew he was a traitor to their cause all along. McCain will exit gracefully, and the right will run a dead-in-the-water candidate like Mitt Romney in McCain's place . Obama will win in a landslide.

The Outrage Drug

2008-04-25T15:54:00.000-07:00

I've been so worked up about the democratic primary race that I've had to take a two-week time-out between the Pennsylvania and Indiana/North Carolina primaries. Watching cable news channels and surfing web sites like the Huffington Post and Politico was driving me nuts, so now all of that is off limits.

I think those web sites and especially the cable news outlets feed two addictions (and I use that word literally) prevalent in people. The first is the addiction to reading and hearing opinions that reinforce your own. "Thank God other people realize how truly corrupt and unfit to govern Hillary Clinton is. What a relief!" It feels good to read many different opinions and angles on that basic belief that seems so clear to me and cries out for reinforcement in the face of its far from universal adoption.

The other is the addiction to outrage at seeing contrary opinions - some people actually think Clinton has what it takes, is more electable, is not so obviously a robotic sociopath dead set on assuming the seat of power at ANY cost. They think Barack Obama is a fraud, or worse, that America's not ready to elect a black president, so even if he's the better candidate - even if he's the ONLY one with integrity and decency - better to vote for the one we think is more electable. (I feel the outrage bubbling up even as I write this).

Those addictions are what drive the ratings for the cable news shows and the traffic to those web sites. But are they serving any other purpose? Maybe they motivate citizens to write or talk about the issues, but you don't learn much by talking with like minded people, and you don't get anywhere talking to people whose beliefs inspire outrage in you. In short, I'm not sure how constructive the emotional responses are - perhaps a sense of injustice or passion for the truth would inspire some to actually do something about the state of affairs - march on Washington, write to your government officials, campaign for a candidate or donate money to a cause. But otherwise, you're merely driving yourself nuts and perpetuating businesses that have tapped into your addiction.

And the cable networks and political web sites have a sense of what works to drive readership - your outraged attendance will only inspire more outrageous coverage designed either to reinforce your beliefs or rail against it.

This tendency seems to be spilling into sports writing and reporting, to ESPN and elsewhere - there's a sense that saying outrageous things - even things that generate hate mail - will get you noticed. And attention is a kind of popularity - the one that advertisers care about. If you can't stand a particular pundit or his views, the best way to handle it is to turn him off. Don't respond, don't criticize, don't mention him. Your emotional outrage is his oxygen, and you can suffocate him by turning away.

If we want the scourge on our democracy that is cable news to go away, we must collectively resist the temptation to give in to our addictions and watch it. We need to be informed of the facts, but to avoid both like-minded and contrary opinions as much as possible.

The chemistry in our brains that draws us to these emotional states probably isn't that different than the kind that drives us to drink or use drugs.

After a few days of enforced withdrawal, it feels good to just say no.

Waves, Particles, Stocks and Dollars

2008-04-25T15:45:00.000-07:00

I can't remember the exact context in which initially I read about this. Apparently, all matter has both wave and particle-like properties.

I started thinking about this in relation to my stock portfolio which fluctuates so much from day to day and week to week. If my stocks went up $1000, should I go out and spend $500 comfortably, knowing I still had half my profits left? But what happens when it goes back down then?

At the same time, your portfolio is worth what it's worth at any given moment in time, and that $1000 gain is real assuming I wanted to realize it. So stocks are like matter in that they have this duality about them - they're a fluctuating wave, and also a particle. Once you sell, you get particles (dollars). Of course, those also have wave-like properties as the currencies rise and fall.

I suppose the wave/particle duality paradigm is useful for looking at a lot of phenomena, and it helps us embrace fluctuation and inconstancy more comfortably. Which is good given that we ourselves are particle/waves, too.

The Faithlessness of Hillary Clinton

2008-04-19T19:01:00.000-07:00

There's a lot of bullshit about who's more in touch with the American people, which includes the usual declarations by both candidates that they're people of faith. But faith isn't about going to church or talking about God, is it? For it to have any authenticity, you'd think it would include a sense of doing your best and leaving the rest of to Providence - or whatever else you choose to call it.

And that's where the Obama and Clinton campaigns differ so starkly. Obama makes his points, does his best and lets the chips fall. If he has an issue with his pastor or some ill-chosen words, he acknowledges the communication error and moves forward.

Clinton on the other hand denied that the Bosnia slip-up was a lie, then when the evidence was overwhelming says that she misspoke. She throws the "kitchen sink" at Obama, feigns outrage at his criticisms of her over NAFTA (which turned out to be true) and cynically tried to exploit Obama's "bitter" gaffe by pretending to be a gun-lover. There's no sense of her getting her vision and message out and being true to herself which is what you'd expect for a person of "faith." There's just no confidence in her message, in the American people or in way of Providence. In fact, it's just the opposite - she seems like a giant ego fighting and scrapping against the way things are to the bitter end.

Letter to Maureen Dowd

2008-04-17T19:51:00.000-07:00

I don't mean to single her out for writing a bad column on Obama's "bitter" gaffe - pretty much every pundit did. It's because they're not analyzing what Obama actually meant, but instead what they think the dumbasses in Pennsylvania will think. But apparently those dumbasses aren't as dumb as they think. According to polls, Pennsylvanians actually get Obama's intent. In any event, here's my letter to Dowd:

Ms Dowd,

I usually enjoy your columns, but I find this one to be particularly off base. Not only do you make the mistake that many have of interpreting Senator Obama's remarks implausibly, but you also spin them to fit your half-baked thesis that he can't close Senator Clinton out.

The truth is he has closed her out - just so gently and gentlemanly that you haven't even noticed. Perhaps you would prefer more drama, but it's not his style. She's finished, but in a free country, she's entitled to her delusions, of course.

As for your interpretation of his remarks, he can't possibly believe that people only hunt or attend church because they're broke. He's saying people vote defensively because they've lost hope that the economic situation will get better. They don't trust Washington to fix it (with good reason) and hence they're bitter. So they cling to the couple things they hold dear and vote DEFENSIVELY - do whatever you want with the tax cuts for the rich, but at the very least don't start letting gays marry and take away our guns.

When Kerry lost, the polls showed VALUES played a huge part. That's what it was - that no one trusted Kerry to fix the problems, and the cynical republicans basically said - this guy's an elitist, he doesn't care about you. So vote for us because we're the party of God and guns. And it worked.

That's all Obama was saying - that in the VOTING BOOTH, they cling to these things and vote defensively.

Clearly, no one can seriously believe that hunting and churchgoing only happen when people lose their jobs.

Again, I typically enjoy your column and your wit, but I think you've missed the mark here.

Thanks for the column

Not sure I actually enjoy her columns - some are okay, others are a little gossipy. But I was hoping to get a response. Which I haven't gotten yet.

Pundits Get Obama's "Bitter" Quip Wrong

2008-04-12T10:10:00.000-07:00

Barack Obama might have "inartfully" described Pennsylvania voters as "bitter", but most of the pundits I read have completely botched the analysis of it. Probably the worst offender - and he's been pretty brutal throughout the campaign season is Mickey Kaus' in his blog on Slate.com - which has also slipped generally.

Kaus cites commentary by Michael Lind and calls it useful:

According to Obama, working class (white) people "cling to guns" because they are bitter at losing their manufacturing jobs.

Excuse me? Hunting is part of working-class American culture. Does Obama really think that working-class whites in Pennsylvania were gun control liberals until their industries were downsized, whereas they all rushed to join the NRA...

This reading of his statement is totally off base. Obama's not saying they're clinging to guns literally as in, they're grabbing a shotgun and hunting only because they're having problems paying the bills. He's saying they're VOTING based on issues like guns, gay marriage and religion because they've lost faith in voting the real economic issues. And they've lost faith for good reason - because politicians have lied to them. So they vote based on these narrow issues instead because at least they can agree on them.

In other words, he's not saying their culture of hunting or going to church exists only because of bitterness toward the way they've been neglected economically - he's saying that they VOTE defensively to protect what's left of their way of life because they've been given so little reason to expect improvement from government. The Clintons and Bushes despite pretending to be the friend of small-town working-class Americans have abandoned them. They vote defensively, and Obama is explaining that to his supporters - that it constitutes a challenge to his campaign.

The reading by Kaus and Lind is either deliberate spin to make the remarks sound worse, or they're both just stupid.

Also, Hillary Clinton, of course, is the one condescending to the people of Pennsylvania because she panders to that defensive voting - saying, among other things, that she believes in the 2nd Amendment. She's basically saying: "Keep voting on dumb things that aren't really helping you rather than throwing the bums out who neglected you and your families." She's trying to stoke their attachment to these more minor issues which, as Obama implied, serve to displace their real and pressing concerns about their quality of life.

This is similar to the way in which Islamic radicals stoke hatred of the West to young Arabs crushed by poverty and lack of opportunity. Their real anger is toward their governments and leaders, but the militants get them to displace that and direct it toward the West.

I don't think Clinton's strategy will work because Obama spoke the truth, and enough voters in the remaining states will get that.

There Were Orders to Follow

2008-04-04T13:19:00.000-07:00

2008 7:43 am
Link

I read a post somewhere saying the mainstream media's not giving this much play, and in truth, I don't really care about it, either.

It's not that it isn't horrendous - it is. But so what? Bush and Cheney and Gonzalez and Yoo and Rove did something else that was horrendous. I mean, no one's going to DO anything about it, so why even waste time on outrage? Why even click on the headline any more. And the media senses this, and that's why it doesn't get much run.

Outrage is great when there's a path to its satisfaction. Will we impeach someone, put him in prison, embarrass him to his face? No, we won't do such a thing. I don't know if anyone watched Jon Miller and Joe Morgan on ESPN's Opening Day Sunday night broadcast, but President Bush stopped in, and they had the most amiable chat imaginable. No one's going to do anything about it, so why bother with this stuff. I don't care to read more. Just do something about it, please. Let's have some accountability. Otherwise, what's one more affront to the constitution or our civil rights?

That's also why no one wants to hear about Iraq any more - because unless someone's held accountable - and I mean seriously accountable - as in liquidating the assets of the neocons bank accounts to pay for veteran's medical care - (which would be a slap on the wrist compared to the true karmic retribution in store for them if such a thing exists) - then it's a miserable story because there's no justice.

That's the real problem with this. And the unlikelihood of justice makes outrage unsatisfying and therefore depressing. So honestly, who cares about these torture memos and what happened in Iraq's prisons and the war profiteering and rendition and Guantanamo and the Patriot Act and warrantless wiretapping and the political persecution of US Attorneys and Katrina - because heads are not rolling.

So please, don't bore me with new revelations that continue to prove something I already knew: that the people in charge for the last eight years did terrible things.

The Deadbeat Candidate Offers Economic Solutions

2008-03-30T11:25:00.000-07:00

Let's set aside for a moment the irony of a candidate whose campaign was a financial disaster claiming to be the one best able to handle some seriously difficult economic challenges. That's preposterous enough, but what strikes me as worse is who is getting stiffed by Clinton's financial mismanagement.

Turns out it's small businesses in Ohio, Iowa and New Hampshire who are still owed money, and the emails and calls to Clinton's campaign are not being returned.

When you consider all the rhetoric about helping working families, protecting blue-collar workers against corporate greed, etc., this strikes me as particularly damning because the campaign is doing the exact opposite - literally. These small business owners and employees can speak up on a small scale, and the Washington Post did a story on it, but in the end, the campaign probably knows that their complaints won't affect the outcome of the race. And for that reason, it's almost more revealing - this is how she treats people when she doesn't think anyone's watching.

What Made Richardson Flip?

2008-03-29T11:23:00.000-07:00

There's an article in Slate Magazine by John Dickerson that tries to discern the motive behind Governor Bill Richardson's endorsement of Barack Obama. Dickerson writes:

What's significant about the [Nancy] Pelosi and Richardson duet is that both seem to have made a calculation that in the long-brewing tension between party elites and the new grass roots, they're siding with the latter. These veteran Democrats may be making their moves based on their assessments of Obama as a candidate, but they also may be informed by his success in raising money online and from a huge number of small-dollar donors, which may mean a dilution in the power of traditional rainmakers.

Dickerson brushes aside as a vague possibility that Richardson might actually think Obama's the better candidate, but pushes the idea that where the money's coming from in the democratic party "may" also be responsible.

Now it may, and the assertions here are so flabby that Dickerson could plausibly say that he was just raising certain possibilities, but the tone and underlying assumption is that Richardson made a calculated political move that might be explained by following the money.

I'm not saying it's impossible that Richardson did this, but why characterize his motive as a "calculation?" Maybe he just genuinely believes Obama would make a far better president? Doesn't that trump all kinds of political motives?

In short, I think a problem with a lot of political coverage is this cynicism that there must be some self-interested motive with Obama supporters the way there is for Clinton's.

I don't know how an Obama presidency would affect my financial interest, but I'm supporting him because I believe he'll do his best to act in the interests of the GOOD. Whatever that is. I haven't been pandered to - I don't care about his health care plan vs. Clinton's - who knows how that will eventually shake out? Can't that be the rationale for a lot of people - even Richardson?

In fact, I think that's what's fundamentally different about Obama's candidacy is that people support him because they believe (rightly or wrongly) that he's out for the GOOD generally, and they trust that if the GOOD is pursued (not the narrow good vs. evil
"good" that Bush pursued), then we will all be better off on the whole.

And I think this is the sense in which Obama intends to transcend the divisive politics of race, gender, etc. There's been some commentary that Obama's failed to transcend race given the Reverend Wright flap, but I don't think he's trying to transcend the topic of race or avoid talking about it - he transcends it by appealing to the GOOD of the whole, not the good for black people or certain divisions of the population in particular.

Clinton incidentally seems to do the exact opposite, pandering individually to blue collar workers, big business, hispanics, women, etc. Of course, her job's tougher because she's got to lie - there's no way to individually look out for every group - if you take care of big business, blue collar workers lose. If you take care of the blue collar workers, big business loses. She essentially has to lie to somebody because somebody's not going to get his back scratched as promised in the end.

But in looking out for the GOOD, there are no losers because everyone has a stake in that - even if it costs some groups financially in the short run.

Why There's No Chance for Clinton

2008-03-26T17:05:00.000-07:00

Forget about the math - which is reason enough - but I think fundamentally, Clinton can't win because I refuse to live in a world where that's possible. It just won't be brought into being in my reality. Period.

I refuse it. I reject AND denounce it.

And I think a lot of people feel the same way.

It was depressing to be sure when Bush won the 2004 election, but it's not like anyone had much hope for improvement under John Kerry. In this case, to have genuine optimism taken away for what - a petty, dishonest politician of the worst kind - it's an indignity that my world view would not permit.

It's also why the Clintons and the democratic party have no idea what's coming to them if they botch this - the party will cease to exist because enough people know the difference here.

The Fundamental Difference Between Obama and Clinton

2008-03-26T14:46:00.000-07:00

Obama's candidacy is fundamentally different from Clinton's because it has vision; she merely has tactics. That's why he's able to give a speech like that in response to the Wright flap, and she's unable to come clean about Iraq. Speaking to the American people honestly is part of that vision, irrespective of whether it ultimately was the most sound tactical move. (Many have argued that throwing Reverend Wright under the bus would have been smarter politically).

The other reason Clinton can't come clean on the war is that it's not the "yes" vote that's dirty, but the motivation. Remember, she didn't even read the intelligence report. And it's not because she was too busy - what could possibly be a higher priority than that? It was because the content of the intelligence report would only be relevant for someone trying to get the vote *right*. She was trying to seem tough on national security. So how can she repudiate the vote? She'd have to admit that she should have read the report and address why she didn't.

So we have a clear choice - pick a candidate who will do his best to get things right, or pick one who will be playing the political game. Sometimes the two overlap, and even Clinton will take action resembling public service. But the vote on the Iraq war was an instance in which they diverged with particularly tragic consequences. There will be other such instances.

Obama should rout McCain - a weak candidate who's not even particularly liked by his own party and who's running to continue the policies of the worst and least popular president in American history. It would be much easier if Clinton put aside her petty ambitions in the interest of the democratic party, but someone's going to have to convince her why that's a smart tactic.

Stop The Monsters

2008-03-26T14:10:00.000-07:00

It shocks me that anyone can support Hillary Clinton for president when we so urgently need a genuine leader and credible human being in that job after eight disastrous years. I can understand the frightened superdelegates who fear for their jobs if they jump ship - it's cowardly and despicable - but I can at least understand why they are fearful. But Americans who listen to the candidates, observe their demeanor, the way they carry themselves, the way their campaigns are run, the people who manage them - I cannot, for the life of me, understand how they could be for Clinton.

I also can't understand what Howard Dean, Nancy Pelosi, Al Gore, John Edwards and Harry Reid are waiting for. Do you want to give Clinton two more months to sling dirt on the best candidate you've had in 50 years, or do you want to exercise some judgment and courage and endorse the person who has a chance to win in November, and much more importantly, will sincerely undertake the monumental task of setting America back on the right course?

Because in the end, the democratic (or republican) party only has importance insofar as it benefits America generally. If you're not going to show the minimal courage to do the obvious here, what relevance do you really have to America's citizens?