The Big Con

Excuse me, but I have some reservations and a bunch of questions about the various healthcare reform bills both houses of Congress could vote on as early as this month.

The biggest concern I have is why we taxpayers are subsidizing the private carriers to insure us. The bills are aimed at guaranteeing growing private insurance profits without regard to improving our health. Oh, there are a few caveats thrown in to eliminate companies from dumping us because of pre-exiting conditions and a bunch of other measures to right a wrong by the privateers.

But I have seen nothing in the proposed bills to force the insurance companies to be more competitive in their implementation of premiums and copays. Although politically improbable, a Medicare-for-all program is the only fiscal solution to force competition. Stop the subsidies and invest the money in a single-payer or government-option system in which enrollment is voluntary.

I'm not buying Republican criticism that the government cannot run anything efficiently and point to the U.S. Postal Service and Amtrack as examples. They say Medicare is going broke and MediCaid is blowing states' budgets. True but fixable. These are two of the highest risk demographics susceptible to demands on keeping Americans alive and well. Adjust Medicare's $96 per month premiums for all to a cost based on the individual's income. That's a starter.

Unfortunately, MediCaid recipients must be paid by tax dollars if they qualify on the lowest rung of the income ladder. In California, that's about $10,000 a year for a single person. Missing that criteria, Californians in Medi-Cal must pay $540/mo for catastrophic coverage which dooms each and every one to death. Those were the figures the state notified me when I re-certified for Medi-Cal last month. Under the current system, the feds subsidize Health Net, my private carrier, 100% with minimal copays for drugs and none for medical costs.

If you listened with earnest the one-hour special comments on our health care system by Keith Olbermann on his MSNBC Countdown show Wednesday night, you heard a similar pitch for a one-system payer or Medicare-for-all as well as a plug for free medical clinics for the impoverished. For the most part, I was disappointed although his personal confrontation with the system involving his father was poignant.

There seems to be a universal assumption by liberals that every senior cherishes Medicare despite its warts. I belong to that group because without it I would be dead. But, I don't consider myself an idiot when I hear our president claim more than $500 billion can be saved from Medicare fraud and waste. If that is true, why didn't Medicare fix the problem years ago?

The proposed healthcare legislation received a double boost Wednesday when the Congressional Budget Office issued a report that the Senate Finance bill under chairman Max Baucus would meet the president's goal that any legislation be deficit neutral. At the same time an AP-GfK poll indicated rising approval ratings for healthcare legislation now split at 40-40 compared to 49% who opposed it last month.

The report, according to the New York Times, said 25 million of the 48 million uninsured -- about one-third of them illegal immigrants -- would not be covered although Americans under age 65 with insurance would increase from 83% to 94% in 10 years. Here's a partial analysis by The Times:

In its analysis of the Senate Finance Committee bill, the budget office said a proposed expansion of Medicaid would add $345 billion to federal spending over the next 10 years. State Medicaid spending would rise by $33 billion, as 14 million people would be added to the Medicaid rolls.

The other big federal cost would be subsidies totaling $461 billion over 10 years, to help low- and middle-income people buy insurance from private carriers.

The budget office said a proposed tax on high-cost insurance policies would raise $201 billion over 10 years. Penalties paid by people who go without insurance would total $4 billion over 10 years, far less than the $20 billion expected under Baucus’s original proposal. Employers who did not provide health benefits would pay $23 billion in penalties, down from the $27 billion previously estimated.

Baucus’s bill would create a Medicare commission, with power to make cutbacks in the program, unless blocked by subsequent legislative action. The budget office said the commission would save $22 billion over 10 years.

I have a premonition advanced by Chris Mathews of MSNBC's Hardball show that President Barack Obama will finally exert his muscle and arm-twist reluctant Democrats and a few Republican Senators to support the final bill as it comes out of a joint conference committee.

Public option or not, that bill looms as a boondoggle keeping the private insurance carriers in charge of our health system and that fact in itself produces a death rattle in the throats of the American public.

Here Comes The Clown

Shame on the established America media for giving so much air time to convicted former Congressman James Traficant who offers nothing but a populous sound bite and venom to his former colleagues.

Since his release from prison last month, Traficant has spent much of his time on the air waves pleading his innocence to a racketeering conviction and vendetta against the Justice Department and the Jewish lobby.

In the interviews he has threatened to re-enter politics and slay the dragons that exist in his mind. The man is a disgrace and the only oxygen he receives on his political death bed is his penchant for famous quotes such as Beam me up." For that reason, the media can't stay away from him. Whatever substance he offers is in the eye of the beholder.

Congress can ill afford yet another sham artist bullying his way with appeals to the "little guy."

On a recent appearance on MSNBC's Chris Mathews show, Traficant said "I still have Federales swarming around me. They won't admit that, but they're looking for every opportunity to send me back."

Over the course of their interview, Traficant decried spending and taxes, claimed to have spoken at Tea Party Rallies, and professed support for a "fair tax" and the abolishment of the Internal Revenue Service. His zingers included the well-known "Beam me up" but a new one, "Stimulate this." He chastised Mathews for muddying his name by referring to him as "congressman."

Some highlights on a recent CNN morning show:

• On his incarceration in which he served much of his time at a medical facility in Rochester, Minn. "They said I had a medical problem," he told CNN's John Roberts, because "I wouldn't take the medication" saying he didn't trust prison officials.

• On whether he will run for Congress: "I am not sure at this point," he said, noting, "the only way I can get back at the justice department is to get back into Congress."

On observations by Mayor Jay Williams of Youngstown, Ohio, that Traficant "no longer represents who we are," Traficant said he had yet to meet the mayor, adding in a list of his own accomplishments, "Those three bridges he crosses when he goes to work? I built them."

Traficant told Roberts: "I am going to have a lot of political opposition," should he run for office, "but I don't give a damn."

Fox News' Greta Van Susteren was the first to interview Traficant the day he was released from prison. Here is that network's account of the interview:

Susteren asked him if he has any grudges. Traficant says that he was the number one target of American Israeli Public Affairs Committee and the Justice Department. He goes on to say that "he believes that Israel has a powerful stranglehold on the American government. They're controlling much of our foreign policy. They're influencing much of our domestic policy.

(Paul) Wolfowitz as undersecretary of defense manipulated President Bush number two back into Iraq. They've pushed definitely, definitely to try to get Bush before he left to move into Iran. We're conducting the expansionist policy of Israel and everybody's afraid to say it. They control much of the media, they control much of the commerce of the country, and they control powerfully both bodies of the Congress. They own the Congress."

Greta asks him, "are you an antisemite," Traficant replies, "what I am is an American. You see, I think America comes first. And we have a one-sided foreign policy in the Mideast, and we've alienated Arabs who have no way of fighting. So, what they've done -- and I predicted this on the House floor -- is they would export violence to America. And they have. They have no other way to fight.".

He adds, "they have us involved in wars in which we have little or no interest. Our children are coming back in body bags. Our nation is bankrupt over these wars. And if you open your mouth, you get targeted. And if they don't beat you at the poll, they'll put you in prison." He says "Israel gets approximately $15 billion a year from the American taxpayers. That $15 billion is $30,000 for every man, woman and child. And people in my district are losing their pension benefits."

Traficant talked about his controversial defense of John Demanjuk, who was accused of Nazi war crimes, and was facing execution by Israel. Traficant's used the freedom of information act to prove he was innocent and who the real individual was. A ruling by Israel's supreme court released him but Traficant's role angered the Jewish Establishment in America. Demanjuk is now facing trial in Germany, despite being found innocent by Israel.

Unlike most convicted politicians who are sent to country club prisons, he was not given any special treatment. He said he spent time in solitary confinement and was put in danger in a prison full of many illegal immigrants, being a staunch opponent of illegal immigration. He talks about how his experience in prison has changed his entire outlook on the justice system and that he now believes no one should go to prison for non-violent offenses and that he wishes he did more to right the war on drugs when he was in congress.

Unlike Van Susteren, I fail to have a Pavlovian response to Traficant's populist tirades and sound bite zingers. Oh, I suppose if I lived in his Ohio district I would appreciate the bridges he said he had built. But that is not enough to overcome his buffoonery.

The man is a clown and we already have enough incompetent but well-meaning comic operas going on inside the halls of congress and our nation's airways.

I'll make the same pledge about Traficant as I did Sarah Palin: No more stories from me about them until they offer a substantive discourse to politics as we know it in our country.

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/09/23/james-traficant-is-out-of_n_297359.html

A Cat's Meow

Where have you heard this before:

"We believe that the decision to perform a medical or surgical procedure should be made by the ____ in consultation with their ____."

If you filled in the blanks with "patient" and "physician," you were wrong. The correct answer is your cat and veterinarian.

In California, it seems the health care debate has spread to cats. Specifically, the declawing of cats, a procedure technically known as onychectomy or flexor tendonectomy. Cat lovers say declawing a cat's paws is an act of animal cruelty.

And, if you thought the California legislature's only mission last July was to what laughingly is referred to as balancing the budget, you were wrong again.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed a law July 2 that gives the state authority over medical scope-of-practice issues and prevents cities and counties from passing ordinances banning medical procedures starting Jan. 1, 2010.

This has created a state of urgency to beat the deadline in cities such as Santa Monica, Los Angeles and San Francisco to clip a cat's scratching tools, according to a dispatch in today's Los Angeles Times.

Dr. Mark Nunez, president of the California Veterinary Medical Assn., which sponsored the state law, said his group is opposed to bans at the local level. "We believe that the decision to perform a medical or surgical procedure should be made by the owner of the cat in consultation with their veterinarian." The association represents more than 6,000 veterinary professionals in the state.

Memo to Dr. Nunez: Humans don't "own" cats; they take care of them, mostly.

The Santa Monica City Council voted last week to draft an ordinance restricting animal declawing effective no later than Dec. 31. Councilman Kevin McKeown said declawing is "an unacceptable act of animal cruelty."

The city of West Hollywood set the standard by banning declawing except for medical purposes in 2003. The decision was overturned after a challenge by the veterinary association but was reinstated by a state appeals court in 2007. The state Supreme Court declined to hear the case. Under the new state law, West Hollywood's ban will stand, as would any other municipalities' bans that take effect before Jan. 1.

There's one animal rights group that is waffling. Madeline Bernstein, president of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals of Los Angeles, said her group is not in favor of animal declawing but is neutral on the issue of city bans.

Pet owners/caretakers set the rules for the animal kingdom. Declawing an animal seems to me an act of perversion as it would be forcing a human to chew and eat after removing all the teeth. Another acceptable practice for good reason is neutering male and females, a procedure if applied to humans would be associated with those town hall death panel chants.

A crazy world we live in. Human children have no lobby. Pets do.

After 35 Years, A Case Of Tuna And Lost Pension

It must be a bittersweet experience for my mother-in-law and hundreds of cannery workers being honored today for their contributions to a city's industry that was snuffed a generation ago.

The San Diego Unified Port District spent a half-million dollars to erect a bronze sculpture and commemorate the site honoring tuna and albacore fishing and cannery workers at the waterfront.

The story in the San Diego Union-Tribune featured Eloise Osuna, my mother-in-law, as a primary spokesperson for the cannery workers, almost all Latina women. The heritage left behind by these women is superbly portrayed in the story.

At its height in the early 1950s, the industry generated $65 million for the local economy — about $550 million in today's dollars, said University of San Diego economist Alan Gin — and employed more than 17,000 workers.

The decline began in the 1970s because of stricter fishing regulations enacted to protect dolphins and increased foreign competition.

For her 35 years of service, Eloise received a case of tuna.

Eloise Cavada Osuna is a proud woman, a gracious lady who would not speak ill about the cannery bosses and owner for purposes of an event honoring her work in a newspaper story.

But what ended their jobs was not so much the demise of an industry but their life-long savings by the manipulations of a crooked owner who used cannery worker pension funds for his own personal gains.

The cannery Eloise and thousands worked for was Westgate, a subsidiary of the far-flung business empire created by C. Arnholt Smith, owner of U.S. National Bank and founder of the San Diego Padres. U.S. National was the largest bank failure in U.S. history when Smith's house of cards collapsed in 1972. He went to jail and his cannery workers lost hundreds of dollars in monthly pensions.

In the years leading up to the closure, Eloise told me Westgate cannery supervisors encouraged the employees to participate in its retirement fund by contributing portions of their pay checks to the pension fund.

The women decided it was a good investment for the future. After all, Mr. Smith was a powerful man, a philanthropist and voted Mr. San Diego by his peers in the business community. In the end, they were betrayed and their life savings vanished. Eloise believed the bosses were dupes of Smith's scheme.

"Mr. Smith was an evil man," Eloise once told me. Surviving after the canneries shut down was a struggle for all the Latinas and their families. Eloise lived on limited Social Security, Medicare and MediCal benefits and occasional financial help from her children and sons-in-law.

Two years ago she finally inherited her portion of proceeds from her mother's estate and is enjoying the benefits at long last. I danced with her at her 85th birthday celebration and as usual she was the life of the party.

The Guantanamo Bay Fiasco

The building of a prisoner of war camp at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba was as big a screw-up by the Bush administration as is attempts by the Obama administration to close it. Neither administration understood the long-range problems inherent in the system that was created.

That's the analysis we observe in stories today reported in three major newspapers.

Retiring Marine Major Gen. Michael Lehnert was the commander of Joint Task Force 160 which built Camp X-Ray in 2002. He was given little guidance from the Pentagon except do it fast.

"The Geneva Convention seemed to be a pretty good place to start," he said. "I got several copies and had my staff read it." He wanted the prisoners closely guarded but humanely treated, an approach he lost. He said he opposed the harsh interrogation methods requested by the Bush White House.

“Probably before I left Guantanamo," after 100 days in command, "I was of the opinion it needed to go away as soon as possible.” He said at his retirement news gathering Thursday interrogations, which were handled by a different task force, ignited “creative tension” in the officer ranks of Marines, Navy, Army and the Central Intelligence Agency.. Lehnert said he made his views known through “the appropriate chain of command.” He said the United States has a moral obligation to treat the prisoners humanely.

Lehnert will step down next week after heading the Marine Corps Installations West command since 2005. He has guided a massive construction campaign at the seven bases he oversees from an office at Camp Pendleton in San Diego County.

During his presser, the general addressed the subject which is driving the Obama administration crazy -- where to relocate the remaining 220 prisoners of roughly 800 who cannot be released nor held for trial.

He said he opposes the White House inquiry some or all be sent to Camp Pendleton because it could threaten the base's main job of training Marines. This Not-In-My-Backyard chant is echoed by most members of Congress which has delayed funding for Guantanamo closing until the relocation question is resolved. U.S. officials hope to prosecute some of them in federal court and others before military commissions.

Meanwhile, the Washington Post quotes its sources that the fall guy blamed for the current problem at Guantanamo is White House Counsel Gregory B. Craig who convinced President Barack Obama to set a deadline to close the base by Jan. 22, 2010, against the advise of many in both administrations and Congress. The Post:

The White House has faltered in part because of the legal, political and diplomatic complexities involved in determining what to do with more than 200 terrorism suspects at the prison. But senior advisers privately acknowledge not devising a concrete plan for where to move the detainees and mishandling Congress.

Craig no longer is in charge of the base closure, according to the Post.

Craig said Thursday that some of his early assumptions were based on miscalculations, in part because Bush administration officials and senior Republicans in Congress had spoken publicly about closing the facility. "I thought there was, in fact, and I may have been wrong, a broad consensus about the importance to our national security objectives to close Guantanamo and how keeping Guantanamo open actually did damage to our national security objectives," he said.

The Post story implies -- at least to me -- the Obama White House has dropped the urgency of Guantanamo's closing which in part explains its delays in processing the detainees. Part of the problem was this unexpected development the Obama people learned after taking office.

Senior administration officials said the central roadblock during those early months was the condition of the detainee files, which had been left in disarray by the previous administration.

"We assumed that for each detainee there was going to be a file somewhere," one senior administration official said. "Some of the intelligence files were not even organized by detainee. You had to go into a mainframe database and search the name of the detainee to put together a file. So there were weeks, if not months, of putting together the files of detainees that then could be reviewed by the fresh eyes that we wanted."

As the process was getting underway in the spring, the administration began losing support for shutting the facility, in part, officials now say, because the White House did not present a concrete plan for what it would do with the remaining terrorism suspects.

What began as a campaign promise fulfilled has turned into a public relations nightmare for an Obama administration that continually is confronted with the realities of governing.

Now Read This

Headline writers for newspapers and the larger Internet websites have the power to sell, taint, cajole, tease and distort the writer's works in order to lure the reader to take the bait. I took the bait, hook, line and sinker this morning from the following headline on MSNBC's web page:

Why Obama wishes he were king

Or at the very least, he wishes he were Mel Brooks

The article was written by Bill Pascoe, a guest columnist for CQ Politics.

I enjoyed the story. A good read. It explained and backed up with the necessary examples how President Obama must be aggravated because he lacks the power in our constitutional republic to get what he wants despite his personal popularity.

Pascoe leads the story:

Responsibility without authority is a recipe for frustration. But popularity without power is a recipe for aggravation.

I couldn't agree more with what Pascoe wrote but I kept reading on and on wondering when's this king thing and reference to a Mel Brooks skit come to play. Read the entire story and you will see what I mean.

Not till Pascoe's last graph do we come to the headline writer's idea of a grabber:

Mel Brooks said, "it's good to be the King." I'm betting Obama would give anything for a taste of that kind of power.

Om my blog and at TMV I write my own headlines and, yes, plead guilty to sometimes writing a headline of a post in which the lead message is buried in the last graph. It is not a good practice, from a professional journalistic perspective I learned years ago in the newspaper business. The general rule is if you don't grab a reader's attention by the second paragraph, you lost him.

Writing on the Internet is slightly different because you are dealing with niche audiences looking for specific issues they can rant about to either support their views or use as ammunition against opposing ideas.

I have no idea whether Pascoe was pleased with the MSNBC headline. I felt slightly betrayed, thinking it would lead me to one thing and finding something else. In the newspaper business, us writers always had an excuse about the headlines: We didn't write them.

Pascoe's analysis confirmed my impressions of the difficulties of those in power. The president is held responsible for such things he has little or no control: the economy, wars, legislation and backstage support for political candidates he personally favors.

It's now Obama's war in Afghanistan; it's Obama's health care reform plans; it's Obama's climate change legislation; it's Obama's tweaking conservatives for his circumvention of Congress with dozens of so-called czars advising him. You name it. It's Obama's.

Pascoe said that is unfair and an over-simplification. He's right.

Mission Creep In Afghanistan

To the dismay of our military leaders, President Barack Obama is pulling a Brett Favre in deciding to send more troops to Afghanistan. While weighing a change in strategy by the president , Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal warns that unless he is provided more forces and a robust counterinsurgency strategy, the war in Afghanistan is most likely lost.

Today I am filing a comprehensive report on the Afghan divide based on articles in The New York Times and Washington Post. Nothing in these reports convinces me of my conclusions several weeks ago: We should pull out our forces and concentrate on its neighbor Pakistan from afar as we are now doing.

The New York Times:

In a series of interviews on the Sunday morning talk shows, Obama expressed skepticism about sending more American troops to Afghanistan until he was sure his administration had the right strategy to succeed.

“Right now, the question is, the first question is, are we doing the right thing? Are we pursuing the right strategy?” Obama said on CNN. “When we have clarity on that, then the question is, O.K., how do we resource it?”

Obama said that he and his top advisers had not delayed any request for additional troops from Gen. McChrystal because of the political delicacy of the issue or other domestic priorities. “No, no, no, no,” Obama said when asked on CNN’s “State of the Union” whether Gen. McChrystal had been told to sit on his request.

Obama said his decision “is not going to be driven by the politics of the moment.”

In an interview on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” Obama said his top priority was to protect the United States against attacks from al qaeda and other terrorist groups.

“Whatever decisions I make are going to be based first on a strategy to keep us safe, then we’ll figure out how to resource it,” the president said. “We’re not going to put the cart before the horse and just think by sending more troops we’re automatically going to make Americans safe,” he said.

Obama and his advisers have said they need time to absorb the assessment of the Afghanistan security situation that Gen. McChrystal submitted three weeks ago — a separate report from the general’s expected request for forces — as well as the uncertainties created by the fraud-tainted Afghan elections.

Said the top military official in Afghanistan in a 66-page report to the White House and Defense Secretary Robert Gates:

“Failure to gain the initiative and reverse insurgent momentum in the near term (next 12 months) — while Afghan security capacity matures — risks an outcome where defeating the insurgency is no longer possible." In his five-page commander’s summary, Gen. McChrystal ends on a cautiously optimistic note: “While the situation is serious, success is still achievable.”

Reports in both the Times and Washington Post say Gen. McChrystal is expected to propose a range of options for additional troops beyond the 68,000 American forces already approved, from 10,000 to as many as 45,000.

In his report, Gen. McChrystal issues a withering critique of both his NATO command and the Afghan government. His NATO command, he says, is “poorly configured” for counterinsurgency and is “inexperienced in local languages and culture.”

“The weakness of state institutions, malign actions of power-brokers, widespread corruption and abuse of power by various officials, and ISAF’s own errors,” Gen. McChrystal says, referring to NATO, “have given Afghans little reason to support their government.”

The general also describes an increasingly savvy insurgency that uses propaganda effectively and is using the Afghan prison system as a training ground. Taliban and Qaeda insurgents represent more than 2,500 of the 14,500 inmates in Afghanistan’s overcrowded prisons.

“These detainees are currently radicalizing non-insurgent inmates,” the report concludes.

The president in March announced the Afghan policy in the broadest of terms. The Washington Post said Gen. McChrystal interprets it accordingly:

McChrystal said he thinks the way to meet the president's relatively narrow objective of denying al-Qaeda's return to Afghanistan involves a wide-ranging U.S. and NATO effort to protect civilians from insurgents by improving the Afghan government's effectiveness. That means not only more troops, but also a far more aggressive program to train Afghan security forces, promote good local governance, root out corruption, reform the justice sector, pursue narcotics traffickers, increase reconstruction activities and change the way U.S. troops interact with the Afghan population. The implicit recommendation is that the United States and its NATO partners need to do more nation-building, and they need to do it quickly.

The White House says the two major game-changers since the policy announcement in March were Afghanistan's presidential election last month, which was compromised by fraud, much of it in support of President Hamid Karzai and recent polls that deem the Afghan war "not worth fighting" by 51% as well as a lack of support from Congressional Democrats.

The Post ended its analysis with this concluding paragraph:

But Obama's deliberative pace -- he has held only one meeting of his top national security advisers to discuss McChrystal's report so far -- is a source of growing consternation within the military. "Either accept the assessment or correct it, or let's have a discussion," one Pentagon official said. "Will you read it and tell us what you think?" Within the military, this official said, "there is a frustration. A significant frustration. A serious frustration."

Obama should punt. We've been in that country eight years and even though it once was called the "good war" compared to Iraq we must keep in mind that in 1,000 years no invader has ever conquered the Afghans' heart and soul. History usually proves correct in things of this nature. Just ask the Russians.