Health care reform is entering the final stretch in Congress. All sorts of stories will be written in the next few days, but the bottom line is that the Congress is about to pass the most significant economic justice legislation in 40 years and the most fundamental rewrite of our social contract since the New Deal and Social Security.
Like Social Security, Medicare, and, well, everything, this bill is a process, not an end-point. But the expansions of Medicaid, the creation of health insurance exchanges paired with meaningful regulation to make insurance function more like a regulated utility than the ferocious beast it has become, and the subsidies to make insurance affordable are all huge immediate gains for low- and middle-income Americans.
Combine all of those moves with the strong attempts to control costs -- bundling of prices, comparative effectiveness research, etc. -- and we've got something that just may keep people insured for the long term while also being the single biggest piece of deficit reduction legislation passed in the history of this country.
Damn. I know there are a lot of complaints out there, but we stand at a major turning point of American history. The future will build upon this point in a few ways:
Creation of a public option. Count me skeptical that we'll get it in this bill. But the public option is an easier thing to pass in the future than the framework in which it would live and, over the long-term, it is important, but nearly as important as the insurance market regulations and subsidies that will make insurance fair and affordable. We can get back to this and probably in better form than the compromised version we'd get today.
State experimentation. One of the amendments that both Ron Wyden and Bernie Sanders helped insert allows states to take the revenue streams under the bill and implement alternate models of reform, so, yes, California, New York, or even Montana could pass, for example, a single-payer plan and use the federal funds to make it happen.
Implementation of further cost control. This last piece will be the hardest, but it may prove the best. Focusing especially on bundling and comparative effectiveness research, which both create the opportunity to cut costs while increasing quality, we may be able to significantly restrain health care spending while improving health outcomes.
The wonderful people at Families USA, a progressive outfit that has been working on health reform for something like 25 years, put out a report on the effect of health reform on Montana. Over 100,000 Montanans will get insurance. Pre-existing condition discrimination will be a thing of the past.
As The Dude would say, "New s*** has come to light" in the Bowen Greenwood scandal. It turns out that a bill that would have prevented lawmakers from using your tax dollars to give out lucrative golden parachutes to political staff like Bowen Greenwood, Executive Director of the Republican Party of Montana, failed to pass in the 2009 Legislative Session on a party line vote. Guess which party voted against the ban on using taxpayer dollars for golden parachutes?
That's right folks. These Republicans have been caught trying to protect the flagrant money wasting they claim to oppose.
It's bad enough that Republicans blocked every attempt to end the practice of wasting taxpayer dollars on partisan bank rolls for their political hacks, but they've gone and selected the poster child and would-be recipient of this wasteful and illegal spending as their leader. Montana Republicans need to immediately let their constituents know the truth -- will they rethink this monumental hiring mistake or will they continue to block attempts to ban this kind of waste and corruption?
Ah, good ol' Brad Molnar - the Montana Republican party's highest ranked statewide officeholder. Now, LiTW has written a bit about the Public Service Commissioner, mainly about Molnar's complete ignorance - or contempt? - for campaign finance law. This is a man who was, after all, accused of soliciting money from the corporations he oversees for campaign literature, then huffed and puffed through the subsequent investigations, including a ludicrous claim that his government email account was private - after using it to solicit work.
Public Service Commissioner Brad Molnar violated state ethics laws by accepting illegal donations and using state office equipment for campaign purposes, a hearings examiner found.
University of Montana professor William Corbett recommended that Commissioner of Political Practices Dennis Unsworth fine Molnar $5,750 and require him to pay for part of the cost of the proceedings against him because Molnar refused to acknowledge any wrongdoing, was evasive, attacked the complainant and caused delays in the proceedings.
Such a flagrant misuse of his office and a contempt for his constituency and the general public should, under normal circumstances, lead to a tearful resignation. Of course, we're talking Brad Molnar here. Expect him to blame everyone else.
Here is a ten-point rack of antlers, some political reading-between-the lines of what we have learned in the press so far, regarding Poacher-gate.
1) Notice, so far, that Lance Lovell, the Republican hack who got a few headlines out of the Schweitzer-ethics charge back in 2008 (but never any blood) is saying things like Vogel "is innocent of these charges" and is "presumed innocent." He is couching the words carefully as Pogie points out. He's not saying that Vogel wasn't involved in no-good, because
2) Vogel could, by several means, be proven definitively to have been involved.
3) At a minimum, Vogel is on record as mistreating an impeccably credentialed FWP officer who has called Vogel's behavior "demeaning and uncooperative."
4) Sooner or later, there will be a statement from the landowner who confronted Vogel and called the warden, though you can bet that this landowner is no Democrat or he'd already be talking, loudly and proudly.
5) Vogel's gun may or may not surface, but it is highly suspect that Randy, a former cop, sold it immediately after the incident, not to a pawn shop or dealer but at a gun show, where there is no record kept of the sale or buyer. And, that this gun he sold just happened to be a .270, like the bullet they found in the male elk. This fails the laugh test.
6) A little-noticed facet of this story: Rehberg's spokesman says he "doesn't know" whether another staffer was involved in the incident. Um, so let's see: when Rehberg, humiliated by a major story, confronted his top aide in Great Falls, and asked, "Mike, were you a part of this?", we are supposed to believe that Mike Waite said "Boss, I don't really know."?
7) When you try to blame the opposing political party for something like this, it is usually the last desperate measure. Blame the Democrats for mudlsinging. That type of attack is known to be very weak in electoral politics. It rarely affects poll numbers. The central story--the scandal--is remembered. Blaming "negative politics" when a story breaks is usually a fruitless effort, an inside game that might influence a news cycle, but is forgotten when election season comes around. The smelly carcass, the disposed-of gun, the breathlyzer results, or the drunk brawl or the drunken pass-out at the bar, or the drunken falling off the horse--those are the things voters remember.
8) I do believe that this incident, in a cumulative effect, will drag Rehberg down in a signficant way, coming on the heels of the Dustin Frost/Flathead boatwreck story. It's a big enough story that it will continue to roll out and embarass the Congressman. And Vogel, as we now see, is going to try to protect his own ass, not Rehberg's.
9) Nevertheless, watch for Rehberg's statewide spin machine to get into motion. You will see op-eds, letters to the editor, blog posts, comments on web articles, all decrying the mudslinging and the outrageous witch hunt by a Democrat-filled FWP, etc.
10) I doubt the warden who tracked Vogel down is a Democrat, nor are most of the career law enforcement folks at FWP. In the aftermath of the Boating Wreck, the Rehberg spin machine was pretty effective, proving again that Republicans seem to be generally better at that stuff than Dems. But again, as time passes the facts of the accident, not the post-accident spin, is what will be indelible. Let's see what happens with poacher-gate.
Montana's only Congressman is out there touting his support for a ban on earmarks (also called "appropriations") for fiscal year 2011. In case you missed this tweet from Dennis Rehberg:
"I supported the GOP-wide EARMARK MORATORIUM. It's time for an all-of-the-above approach to TRUE spending reform. This is only a first step."
So, this means we can expect Dennis Rehberg not to request/support/tout any earmarks for fiscal year 2011, right? That's interesting, considering his fiscal year 2011 earmark request form is on his website. And it's interesting considering he told the Great Falls Tribune just a few weeks ago:
"Earmarks are not the problem... They direct money that already exists within the program to a particular area, because who knows their district more than we do?"
So which is it? Is Congressman Rehberg against earmarks, as he wants Montanans to think, or is he for earmarks, as he wants Montanans to think?
Confused? You're not alone.
Just last year, Dennis Rehberg took credit for "securing" an earmark for the Watson's Children's Shelter in Missoula. That earmark was tucked away in H.R. 2847, a congressional appropriations bill. Here's what Congressman Rehberg said at the time:
"I'm pleased I was able to secure this crucial funding to help make a real difference in the lives of Montana children."
Of course, that was after Congressman Rehberg voted against H.R. 2847... and against funding for the Watson's Children's Shelter.
I guess only a professional politician can "secure" funding by voting against it. Let's see how much funding he "secures" for fiscal year 2011, even though he supports "the GOP-wide EARMARK MORATORIUM."
The idea of reimporting cheap prescription drugs from Canada, where drugs cost a fraction of what the identical medicine costs here, has been dormant for many months, if not years. Then, yesterday, Schweitzer stormed into the china shop and shattered some dishes.
Two questions arise. First, why had the issue gone dormant? Short Answer: The Obama Administration cut a deal with the Pharmaceutical Industry, early in the healthcare reform game, in which Obama pledged to kill any efforts to reimport drugs from Canada in return for the Drug Industry running TV Ads and other media--$80 million worth--in support of Obama's healthcare plan.
That's a shady deal by any measurement, unless the ultimate Obama plan finds some way to drastically reduce or subsidize prescription prices. Thus far the plan does not appear to do so.
The second question is what the White House and/or Secretary Sebelius is going to tell Schweitzer. Has Schweitzer gotten too cute? Has he poked the tiger one time too many? Will Obama somehow retaliate or freeze-out our Governor? Or, has Schweitzer put them in an impossible position and thus revived a very important issue, and put it on course for some sort of resolution? Perhaps even a concession from the drug industry that is something more than a promise to run stupid and ineffective campaign ads for a stupid and ineffective corporate giveaway which the White House is trying to sell us?
This is a major poke in the eye of the Obama team and is sure to get some national attention (as Schweitzer always seems to do.) But hey, the Obama Administration deserves it.
The terrorist attacks on 9/11 were terrible on so many levels. From the first, numbing shock of seeing bodies falling from the burning towers on live television, to the wicked exploitation of the event by conservatives for political gain, the events surrounding 9/11 for me are inextricably entwined with anger and disgust.
One of the cruder side effects was a new outpouring of racism. Chatter about how terror was unique or somehow integral to Islam - and, specifically, the brown-skinned version -- lightly categorized as a horde on the brink of overrunning the United States. Happily for many righties that vision of an endangered Anglo-Saxon empire dovetailed nicely with rhetoric on immigration, then neatly transformed into the hysteria surrounding Barack Obama's birth certificate and secret, "socialist" agenda.
One of the outputs of all this talk was a call to racial profiling, kicked off by New York's resident whack job, Peter King, back in 2006:
Declaring that airport screeners shouldn't be hampered by "political correctness," House Homeland Security Chairman Peter King has endorsed requiring people of "Middle Eastern and South Asian" descent to undergo additional security checks because of their ethnicity and religion.
The Missoulian jumped right in, supporting the idea (the editorial, alas, has been scrubbed from the newspaper's digital memory):
Of course, many screening measures are intended to dance around an uncomfortable reality. The primary terrorist threat comes not from the general public. Our society's sensibilities and laws, however, don't permit us to focus on that specific subpopulation because it would seem discriminatory. Instead, we screen everybody, conduct random searches and, soon perhaps, even employ high-tech machines trying to divine their hidden intentions. The broad-brush approach makes it less likely to detect a terrorist, not more.
The problem we have is that we are unwilling as a society to acknowledge that we are at war with people who are more homogenous than the general U.S. population. Because of this, using a person's ethnic heritage as one of many factors to decide if a person should be inconvenienced a little more than the 80-year-old grandmother isn't discrimination. It is affirmative action....
But...racial profiling actually makes us less safe...
As Spencer Ackerman notes, racial profiling is "a move that would not have caught shoebomber Richard Reid (British citizen, Jamaican heritage); would-be-underpants bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab at the time (Nigerian citizen, lots of time spent in the U.K.; and now Jihad Jane (American citizen, white as the driven snow, and we know white people can't be terrorists)."
But then, racial profiling isn't about making us safer. It's about making us feel safer.
Reporters have attempted to call him "a conservative activist". Really!? I find no record of any cause he is active in (other than himself.)
Greenwood is well known in the state's political circles all right--as the guy that got caught trying to walk out the door with an illegal, secret $7,000 golden parachute from the State of Montana after his former patron Brad Johnson was voted out of office after serving only one term (h/t.) So much for responsible budgeting!
Oddly, he said he doesn't plan to give up his own campaign for legislature. Can you say "conflict of interest"? He now has free reign to raid the GOP cookie jar to help his own race.
Hilariously, his campaign theme is "Restoring Responsibility to Government."
The latest news about banking regulation legislation in the Senate:
Senator Bob Corker, the Tennessee Republican who is playing a crucial role in bipartisan negotiations over financial regulation, pressed to remove a provision from draft legislation that would have empowered federal authorities to crack down on payday lenders, people involved in the talks said. The industry is politically influential in his home state and a significant contributor to his campaigns, records show.
I've been following politics for a long time, and this is the first time that I can remember where Democrats held a solid and unbreakable majority in both federal legislatures and held the White House. And I have to say, it's been d*mn demoralizing. Evidence A: banking regulation.
You'd think, after watching the financial sector torpedo the American economy, good, efficient, and workable banking regulation would be a priority. And there was hope, in Chris Dodd's consumer protection agency, which would have consolidated financial regulation into one body, and which would have refocused regulation on consumer protection, something has been missing in the crazed, corporate-fueled deregulation blitz of past decades.
You'd think corporate behavior in the financial sector after the bailout - the insolent, massive payouts to its executives, the orchestrated maneuvering to place blame for the crash on blacks and the poor, the exorbitant fees and interest rates imposed on its customers - that regulation would sail through Congress. But Dodd's agency has been effectively torpedoed, regulation watered down.
And now this. Corker's reflexive protection of the most rapacious lending industries in existence. Legal loan sharking targeting those with the least financial savvy and least ability to recover from parasitic interest rates.
And in diluting or warping good legislation beyond recognition, Corker is not alone. After all it was Max Baucus himself who was the first to grab a House jobs bill as it came into the Senate, steered it into his Tax and Finance Committee, and made it contingent on "reforming" the estate tax (and preserving the odious Patriot Act). That's right - a bill to help the unemployed find work must also help the children of the mega-wealthy keep their condos in Vail.
In short, it's been demoralizing seeing this Democratic supra-majority squandered in the back rooms, gutted by "compromises" that riddle bills with so many loopholes that they end up looking like the legislative version of swiss cheese.
Yes, I know, legislation is the result of years of work. Yes, I know I should be patient. Yes, sure, some banking regulation is better than no regulation (...or is it?). But I don't see any relief, any glimmer of values from Democratic legislators.
As the saying goes, you know the true nature of a man by the company he keeps.
Randy Vogel, hired by Rehberg last month as Rehberg's top staffer (replacing former state director Dustin Frost who suffered severe head injuries following the boating accident involving Rehberg, a GOP legislator, and lots of alcohol and is leaving to "become a private consultant"), must appear in court next Tuesday where he will face allegations of poaching and obstructing a police officer, among other charges.
This is the third Republican busted for poaching in recent memory, others include Republican legislator Scott Boggio and Legislative Fiscal "analyst" Terry Johnson.
It is not yet known what effect this most recent poaching scandal will have on Rehberg's and other Republican's electoral chances this fall, but it can't be good.
It's also interesting that Rehberg didn't fire this individual, but instead allowed him to "place himself on voluntary leave."
UPDATE: Pogie at Intelligent Discontent has a great analysis of Vogel's pathetic "defense" here.
