Party of Terror

Talking Points Memo reports:

[Pentagon shooter John Patrick] Bedell even railed against the concept of public education. “Government control of the schools that shape minds is pervasive in today’s world,” he said. “The imperative to defend the freedom of conscience must lead us to eliminate the role of the government in education and leave parents and communities free to raise their children as they see fit.” He denounced public education as “no more legitimate than a government-run church for universal religious training.”

They also includes the audio of his manifesto. One wonders just how many of these events it will take to have an impact on the broader political discourse.

Sadly, though, I anticipate that the primary impact will be people like Palin parroting the “government takeover of schools” line as a trope against education within the week, all the while using the construction as a dog-whistle meant to hail this fuckwit as a brave, patriotic man as opposed to the half-baked, fully lunatic, execrable little domestic terrorist that he was.

Always Bad for the Democrat

Jamison Foser takes a look back to the most recent legitimately questionable use of the reconciliation process, the Bush tax cuts, to gauge what must have been a veritable torrent of “end of democracy” style editorials and hard-hitting analytical articles and investigations. Right?

The Senate reconciliation vote occurred on May 23, 2003. In the month of May, only one New York Times article so much as mentioned the use of reconciliation for the tax cuts — a May 13, 2003, article that devoted a few paragraphs to wrangling over whether Senate Republicans could assign the bill number they wanted (S.2) to a bill approved via reconciliation. The Times also used the word “reconciliation” in a May 9, 2003, editorial, but gave no indication whatsoever of what it meant.

And that’s more attention than most news outlets gave to the use of reconciliation that month. The Washington Post didn’t run a single article, column, editorial, or letter to the editor that used the words “reconciliation” and “senate.” Not one. USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, and the Associated Press were similarly silent.

Cable news didn’t care, either. CNN ran a quote by Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley about the substance of the tax cuts in which he used the word “reconciliation” in passing — but that was it. Fox News aired two interviews in which Republican members of Congress referred to the reconciliation process in order to explain why the tax cuts would be temporary, but neither they nor the reporters interviewing them treated reconciliation as a controversial tactic.

And ABC, CBS, NBC? Nothing, nothing, nothing.

Yep. This time around? Well, that’s totally different, of course:

the media are referring to reconciliation as the “nuclear option” and portraying it as an obscure procedural gimmick being considered in an attempt to circumvent Senate rules and “ram” health care legislation through Congress. The conservative media are going so far as to claim that use of reconciliation would be “unprecedented.”

The Democrat has got to work on its messaging. It’s all that matters. The GOP has sewn the earth with salt re: governance and, really, any sense of shared civic concern whatsoever for over two decades. Any chance to poison the perceived relationship between citizen and government has been used to reassure the populace that government never, ever can provide anything to the governed that couldn’t be better provided by the private citizen.
An equally ferocious, equally long-term effort will be required to reacquaint people with the everyday things that evil big government is doing for them. Most of which are directly enabling enraged GOP voters to live the solitary, exurban lifestyles that make up so much of the current GOP base. That the western “Red” states are livable at all: entirely the result of government spending and ostentatiously generous water policy. Period. That no one living in those states seems to realize this: the fault of the Democrat, and dangerous for the country. This (and messaging on a thousand issues just like it), more than anything, needs to be rectified. And soon.

Post Office eBox

Has it occurred to anyone else that our Post Office, lately a money loser, needs some fundamental rethinking?

Rather than stop Saturday delivery or just raise the cost of a stamp, why not really think about what this organization should be doing long term.

America currently has among the lowest internet access speeds in the civilized world. Especially in more rural areas, there simply isn’t anything other than dialup. And won’t be.

So: gradually re-purpose the Post Office over the next 5 to 10 years. They’re already nationwide and maintain offices in every (or nearly every) zip code. Perfect. Make it such that any citizen can contract with them for internet access and email (and a permanent, personalized domain along the lines of lemkin.po.box or somesuch; yes, this means the government takeover of a new TLD: Shock, horror.). Price access rates inversely to market availability. It would cost more to buy PO.Box domains in, say, Manhattan, NY than in Manhattan, KS, based entirely on existing availability and a given market’s existing broadband penetration. This keeps the government from taking over broadband.
And, obviously, the Post Office itself wouldn’t run out there and start laying fiber, they’d more likely sub-contract somebody else to go do it; the real role of the PO here would be to write down some or all of the initial costs in exchange for longer-term cost recovery than any private firm can safely undertake. Structured properly, companies like Google would have a vested interest in seeing to it that such a nationwide project can be done quickly and as cheaply as possible. And would likely put some of their own effort behind it. This also has the knock-on benefit of requiring a lot of infrastructure investment and, more importantly, it creates a lot of jobs that are entirely or nearly entirely created through the private sector.

The point is: lack of broadband access in this country is a real and still developing crisis. We have a large operation tasked with enabling equal access to communication. So let them do that.

In an op-ed in Tuesday’s Post, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) offered an excellent example of this hypocrisy. Right off, the piece was wrong on a core fact. Hatch accused the Democrats of trying to, yes, “ram through the Senate a multitrillion-dollar health-care bill.”

No. The health-care bill passed the Senate in December with 60 votes under the normal process. The only thing that would pass under a simple majority vote would be a series of amendments that fit comfortably under the “reconciliation” rules established to deal with money issues. Near the end of his column, Hatch conceded that reconciliation would be used for “only parts” of the bill. But why didn’t he say that in the first place?

Hatch grandly cited “America’s Founders” as wanting the Senate to be about “deliberation.” But the Founders said nothing in the Constitution about the filibuster, let alone “reconciliation.” Judging from what they put in the actual document, the Founders would be appalled at the idea that every major bill should need the votes of three-fifths of the Senate to pass.

[…]

Hatch said that reconciliation should not be used for “substantive legislation” unless the legislation has “significant bipartisan support.” But surely the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts, which were passed under reconciliation and increased the deficit by $1.7 trillion during his presidency, were “substantive legislation.” The 2003 dividends tax cut could muster only 50 votes. Vice President Dick Cheney had to break the tie. Talk about “ramming through.”

E.J. Dionne. Thank you.

Requirement

(D) MEMBERS OF CONGRESS IN THE EXCHANGE—

(i) REQUIREMENT—Notwithstanding any other provision of law, after the effective date of this subtitle, the only health plans that the Federal Government may make available to Members of Congress and congressional staff with respect to their service as a Member of Congress or congressional staff shall be health plans that are—

(I) created under this Act (or an amendment made by this Act); or

II) offered through an Exchange established under this Act (or an amendment made by this Act).

(ii) DEFINITIONS—In this section:

(I) MEMBER OF CONGRESS—The term ‘‘Member of Congress’’ means any member of the House of Representatives or the Senate.

(II) CONGRESSIONAL STAFF—The term ‘‘congressional staff’’ means all full-time and part-time employees employed by the official office of a Member of Congress, whether in Washington, DC or outside of Washington, DC.

Music to Lemkin’s ears. By forcing Congress and their staffs onto the exchange, you can be quite sure that there will be a broad array of choices there and that the price will be, er, right. I’ve long said that most of the problem with getting healthcare reform done is that members of Congress simply have no clue what it’s like on the outside: they and their families have nearly-free, 24/7 access to what’s essentially a private physician, fantastically complete coverage with a wide menu of choices for care, and low to no co-pays when something really hits the fan. Plus they cant’ be dropped. Why wouldn’t they persist in calling such a setup “the best healthcare in the world”? It pretty much is. The trouble is that almost nobody outside Congress has access to even a part of a plan like that.

What reform is about is allowing the rest of us access to some of that. And doing it in a way that, even projecting out 20 years, will only be costing the taxpayer 1% relative to doing nothing. Thirty million people will have access to care on the basis of that 1%. And, of course, those same projections show a half trillion dollar savings to the overall budget. Frankly, that’s amazing given the compromised nature and inherently “around-the-edges” approach of this plan so frequently (and nonsensically) derided as “government takeover.” Any plan with a total monetary outlay on the part of the government amounting to ~90 billion dollars a year isn’t a takeover of anything. The Pentagon budgeted

“$52.1 billion [for ancillary items] such as ammunition, portable generators, cooling equipment, field medical supplies, hospital equipment, and night vision goggles”

in 2009. Nothing inherently wrong with any of those things, but that’s a military outlay of $50B a year and doesn’t even get around to, oh, I don’t know, guns.
We’re wasting well north of $40B a year on the plainly idiotic War on Drugs. Don’t even get me started on how many times over our little foray into Iraq could pay for healthcare in this country. But such context never matters to the savvy reporter. Who won today’s political horse race? Who played their press releases better?
Never: who lied? Whose facts were more accurate? What is the broader context of this decision?

Even more importantly, though: people won’t be making career decisions based solely on maintaining their and their families’ access to healthcare. Even if it fails in every other way, signing these reforms into law will let a million startups bloom.

It’s marketing, Jake. Forget about it

In their respective races for total global domination of the ever-popular bland beer segment, SABMiller and Anheuser-Busch have a natural tendency to clash over events like the upcoming FIFA World Cup in South Africa. And why not? Just the fan parks segment of the operation (not the actual stadia where games are going on, mind you) account for a staggering quantity of beer:

40 percent of the 100,000 extra hectoliters of beer SABMiller expects to sell during and around the monthlong tournament, Hewitt said. That’s equivalent to 8 million half-liter (1.1 pint) glasses of beer or 12 million 340 milliliter cans of the beverage.

So why wouldn’t any brewery that could manage to brew that much want a piece of that action? Well, because it’s being sold brandless. “I’ll have a beer” will, for once, apparently be an entirely accurate way to order. Meanwhile, all the advertising in and around the stadia will be done by (you guessed it):

Anheuser-Busch, said by e-mail that his company decided “more than a decade ago to focus our beer presences in-stadium” during FIFA World Cup matches.

This means that SABMiller has scored the exciting prospect of being the vendor behind 12 million can-equivalents of beer like substance. Well played, well played. AB will surely go broke chasing after the rafts of folks who have a brand preference in their choice of beer-like liquids and who may, in fact, assume that (based on all the signage) they are actually drinking AB beer-like liquids.

Eastbound and down, loaded up and trucking: SABMiller (Coors) is gonna do what they say can’t be done: sell even more AB beer based on the perceived quality of SABMiller’s own products. Burt Reynolds better get going on those sit-ups.

A lot of people are noting that Orwell was a socialist and Gingrich doesn’t know what he’s talking about [in his CPAC address], but I’m much more appalled that Gingrich thinks a dystopic piece of fiction was “proof” that “that centralized planning inherently leads to dictatorship” and an argument against health-care reform. That’s like me saying “The Shawshank Redemption” is proof that prison walls are too weak and we should invest serious money into reinforcing them against extremely small rock picks.

Ezra Klein