Morning Fog

Fixing The Postal Service

There has been a lot of talk over at least a year about the need to "fix" the postal service by reducing service, closing post offices, and other measures.  Now, those changes appear closer to fruition as they have been formally proposed.

The Washington Post has conducted a survey which reports that 71% of Americans don't care a bit if the USPS stops delivery on Saturdays.  This is a little surprising to me, but the reality is that most people younger than I don't rely on the Postal Service these days.  Still, it's a reduction in service, and the mail is no different from your local public transportation:  reduce schedules, cut routes, and you drive away even more customers.  It's particularly egregious that stopping delivery on Saturday is being suggested; we have so many of those ridiculous Monday holidays now that approximately every third week, on average, anything mailed on a Friday now cannot be delivered until Tuesday - four days later!   

Less surprising was the Post poll's other result, that 64% of respondents oppose closing post offices.  This, to me, is a more logical move; I've driven some of those back roads in Pennsylvania, for example, where you can pass a small, underutilized post office every couple of miles.  There are real and permanent savings to be had here, and physical post offices are less and less necessary when you can order stamps by mail, or mail a package right from your own computer, leaving it on your doorstep for the letter carrier to take.

Nevertheless, I say, if the USPS is to be a quasi-private business, Congress should approve these changes as rapidly as possibly and let them get on with what obviously are necessary efforts to stanch the flow of red ink.   After all, the "competition" (private carriers) mostly don't deliver on Saturday - but they also don't take off those quasi-holidays like Columbus Day.  If we drop Saturdays, the USPS ought to give up those less meaningful Monday holidays.  And, Congress will need to show some moxie and resist going just partway -- stand up to those who oppose closing any post offices, for example.

In the end, I don't have any illusions that all the suggested cost-cutting measures combined will save the USPS as we know it.  What's needed here is a new business model, with much more radical solutions; more than just cutting costs.

Could Health Care Reform Be Reversed?

Republicans, their corporate sponsors, and the hive of thousands of angry bees that they've purposely stirred with a stick, have fanned out in fevered activity to stop or reverse health care reform.

The first effort, put in the hands of Sen. Mitch "Confused" McConnell and Sen. John "Man-tan" Boehner," was to destroy the new law with a batch of poison-pill amendments, but that fell predictably flat, since the Democrats still have a majority in the Senate.  A silly, foredoomed effort.

But there are many others:  There's the "Tea Party" gang, seeking to persuade politicians that they represent the majority view in the country, fighting a rear-guard action against changing times.  Tea-party-goers, beware, you'll be used and tossed aside, with nothing for your efforts except perhaps a good opportunity to vent for a while.  Look around the party... there's Sarah Palin, playing the Mad Hatter, but also wanting to transform herself into the Queen of Hearts, and then it'll be "off with your heads!"  She's mainly interested in manipulating you for her own benefit, as are the others who work so hard to goad you into political action.

Then there are the dozen or more (who's counting?) state attorneys-general challenging the legality/constitutionality of the "mandate" - the idea that everyone must either buy health insurance or pay a tax instead.  Particularly weird is the activity in my own state, Virginia, whose assembly has already passed a law making it illegal to require the purchase of insurance, and whose Attorney-General evidently hopes to make the case that state law prevails over federal.  (Leave it to those boys in Richmond, the former capital of the Confederate States of America -- they haven't got over the Civil War - er, the "War Between the States" yet. This question was decided in 1865 but they're still whistlin' Dixie).

I've argued before that the legal basis for that claim is nil, but there are those who suggest it may have some merit.  The Obama administration professes itself unconcerned by the constitutional challenge, but I think they have to be a little bit worried. 

It's not that there's merit in the argument, but that the Roberts Court has demonstrated a precocious tendency to reach out and yank in cases no one has asked it to take on, like a frog snapping up a fly.  Roberts may be thrilled at the chance to tackle this one, being presented to him on a silver platter, and his record to this point gives us a good clue as to how he might decide it.  The third leg of the anti-health care trio, the companies of the health care industry, are (for the most part)lobbying furiously against the changes.  Whether they manage to change any opinions in the Senate or House or not, or defeat some current members, they have a not-too-secret admirer in the Chief Justice.  I fear that legal arguments will play second chair.

So:  Can health care legislation be killed, or rendered ineffective, by its opponents?  I'd say it could be weakened, or that some of the opposition actions could deal a mild political setback to the Obama administration (which is really the purpose of the exercise anyway).  But I don't see it as having potential to destroy the core achievements of the new law. 

The tea party folks are likely to be disappointed.  Recently the Washington Post carried a human-interest profile of Randy Millam, an Iowan who opposes the changes and drove fifty miles to participate in a demonstration against it.  He was a sympathetic enough character, sincere in his beliefs and not going to extremes of violence.  "When will 'they' listen to us?" he lamented. He's made the natural supposition that if everybody he knows is against it, the whole world must be against it.  It does not seem to have occurred to him that, as polls have demonstrated frequently, a majority in fact does support most of these changes.  And 'they' are listening to that majority, as they should in a democracy.

The movement to declare the mandate unconstitutional may have a greater chance of success, but this wouldn't derail the reform as a whole.  The same result may be achieved in different ways.  In the meantime, while celebrating this "success," those who sparked it may want to reflect on the fact their actions will have made it harder to reduce the costs of health care (one of their supposed goals); will have denied the insurance companies (their allies) 30 million new customers they're eager to get their hands on; and will have restored those same companies' stranglehold over people's relationships with their physicians.  It's the law of unintended consequences.

In Defense of Michael Steele

I never supposed that I might be defending RNC Chairman Michael Steele.  The man is a boob, and like other sorts of boobs, he's sometimes thrust forward to attract attention though close inspection reveals little significance.  

Nevertheless, fair is fair, and to accuse him of purposely triggering violent attacks on lawmakers by his remark about putting Democrats who voted for health care reform "on the firing line," is excessive.  That's pretty standard political rhetoric.  While we're at it, even frontierwoman Sarah Palin might be forgiven her remarks about "reloading" -- she lives in a gun culture, right?  Not that her remark couldn't incite some other wacko.

On the other hand, what about my fellow Virginian, Rep. Eric Cantor, who's busily trying to convince people that it's the Democrats who have touched off violence against themselves, and are just exaggerating the attacks from the raving right?  This is the argument of a wild-eyed zealot who loses credibility by his inability to be honest.  Yes, all elected officials probably receive a few threats, but the recent violence against Democratic Congressmen/women is different. 

It's not that any one individual has sparked these recent incidents, but that the entire thrust of Republican tactics on the health care bill has been to use lies and fear to stir people up.  In these circumstances, it's not surprising that we've seen a few incidents.  If we don't see any more, we'll be lucky.  But Cantor and others should be seeking to calm the waters.  Clearly they are desperate to avoid getting caught in the negative backwash of what they created.  As I have said earlier, I don't think they can...

A Capital Idea

Lately a few horrendous cases have brought capital punishment back into the foreground of our consciousness.   Virginia, for example, recently executed convicted rapist/murderer Paul Powell for his heinous 1999 crimes.  In another case from the Mid-Atlantic region, a mother had admitted killing two of her daughters and keeping their bodies in a freezer; her case ended two days ago with a life sentence, but doesn't it sound like a good one for the death penalty?

It's trendy to oppose capital punishment, but I have to admit that I don't see a problem.  Other than a general soft-heartedness about "taking a human life," (and by the way the surviving victim of rape/murder in the linked article above tells us that she was against the death penalty -- but is in favor of it now) most of the objections to legal execution don't hold water. 

Fairness?  To me it seems only fair that anyone who wittingly takes a life should be expected to give up his own (the exceptions are for cases where death was not intended, or accidental; or for perpetrators who couldn't tell right from wrong (and these are rare). Insanity or mental instability might, or might not, disqualify -- it depends.  Absent evidence that criminally psychotic cases are curable, what benefit does society reap from "sparing" such people for a life at government expense?   

Concern for executing the wrong person?  Conceivably that could occur but many of the historical cases that opponents point to happened because of racist indifference to the niceties of evidence, rather than failures of the judicial system per se.  At any rate, in the age of DNA and other forensic evidence, I believe that likelihood of a mistake in future is increasingly slim.

Religious principles?  Hardly.  Through history, nearly all major major religions have condoned or even encouraged, at one point of another, the murder of "infidels" and "heretics."  Moreover, both the Bible and the revered fundamental texts of other major religions provide us the well-known "eye for an eye" motto.  Capital punishment IS a religious principle. 

Doesn't fit the crime?  In fact, it's completely justifiable to apply the death penalty in lesser crimes than murder.  Crimes of extreme senseless violence, rape, torture, brutality, and the like qualify easily, especially when the offense is repeated, although in these cases courts and juries need to have the flexibility to sort out the finer points of the circumstances.  We need the concept of "cruel and unusual" applied to the injury and suffering of victims. 

In short, the death penalty operates effectively for society in a number of ways.  It may not deter the commission of crimes in most cases, but it does reduce the costs to society of trying and supporting such offenders; it provides victims and their families a measure of consolation; and as the old saw goes (cynical but true) it prevents recidivism.

  

Odd Political Reckoning In Immigration

Latinos believe that immigration reform has been ignored in the political firestorm surrounding health care, and staged a demonstration Sunday in Washington to bring attention to the topic.  It was too early, because their effort drew little attention amid the final House voting on health.  Nevertheless, here's another place where existing policies are clearly ripe for reform, and one that would seem to offer some good opportunities for Republicans and Democrats to cooperate.  Both seek to attract Latino voters; both see the need for changes. 

And, there has been some movement toward a bipartisan effort sparked by Sen. Charles Schumer and Sen. Lindsey Graham.  Yet - and here's the point of my little essay today - rather incredibly, Republicans including Graham are reportedly saying that if the health care bill passes, they will not cooperate on immigration legislation.  Is that not amazing political calculus?  Apart from an extreme, even terminal, case of sour grapes, it's hard to imagine what they are thinking. 

Here's another issue crying out for change (let's not call it reform) on which Republicans again are going to refuse to cooperate.  Can they truly believe that attitude will attract votes in November?  We've heard that the GOP is concerned about its weak showing among Latino voters... but not worried enough, apparently, to come to grips seriously with an issue that's key to that demographic.   Maybe they believe that Latinos will blame the Democrats for passing health care and hurting GOP feelings, making it impossible for the sensitive Republicans to cooperate.  Good luck with that!

Once again, I can only hope that sensible Republican (and other) voters will help steer the party back toward its roots - toward American roots - come November.

Base, And Baser

Now that the omnibus health care reform bill is past its highest hurdle, it's all over but the shouting (if political analysts are to be believed).  As we saw Sunday, the shouting is definitely not over, and it's unfortunate that many of our supposedly upstanding elected officials chose to be the cheerleaders of it. 

Republicans have a great deal to answer for in their behavior on this issue over the past 12 months, but nothing more reprehensible and irresponsible than their self-serving, anti-American, Nazi-style incitement of the basest instincts of their very base base -- racial hatred, fear of change, selfishness, rejection of progress. These Republicans would like America to be a third world nation -- the only developed country not to offer its people universal health care. Obama and the Democrats have saved us from that. 

The lack of GOP support doesn't reflect real differences over the issues, despite claims to the contrary; it reflects only the playing out of a party strategy designed purely for political gain.  Now the Republicans are tarred with their own brush, coated with the muck they stirred up.  If the quiet, sensible, pro-American majority of Republicans have any sense, they'll turn these worthless no-counts out of office in November.

Student Loans

How interesting that changes to the student loan program will be folded into the health care bill.  While this is mainly a matter of political convenience/wisdom for the Obama administration, this smaller issue also has an interesting, almost poetic, relationship to health care.

In student loans, we see the early sprouting of the same breed of acorn that gave birth to our health care mess:  the concept that private jobbers must be given an intermediary role in what is more naturally a direct relationship between a government and the people.  In health care, this led to our crazy quilt of employer-based health insurance, and a whole network of companies whose profit margins provided no added value except to the companies themselves. 

Now, in student loans, we see a replicable lab experiment that has allowed us to examine and study the same process.  It has not worked; or rather, it has not provided any added value.  The case the administration makes for cutting out the middleman and using the $60 billion "savings" to provide more direct support to education programs is a slam dunk. 

Naturally, Republicans, their knees jerking uncontrollably, have opposed it.  They support cost-cutting in government programs except when they might restrict the flow of tax dollars to private interests.  The "concern" that it would be "more difficult" for students and colleges to deal with the government directly is both unproven and laughably petty (is this convenience really worth $60 billion?).  In any case, loan servicing would remain in the hands of those ever-effective private and quasi-private institutions, so nothing is lost there.  The "concern" about jobs lost is a red herring, in light of the infinitesimally greater number of jobs lost as a result of the great Republican-generated economic crash of 2008.

Critics of the health care reforms now on the table like to raise the bogeyman of "government bureaucrats" coming between freedom-loving Americans and their doctors.  They prefer that corporate bureaucrats, whose mission is to pump up profits by denying claims and questioning a physician's recommendations, be the ones to come between Americans and their doctors.  The situation is no different in the realm of student loans.  It's high time to stomp on this would-be mighty oak of corporate entitlement before it gets any larger.

Keeping Up With Morning Fog

E-mail updates: It has come to my attention that many readers of Morning Fog would prefer to be notified by e-mail when something new is posted here, rather than receive it through a feed.  So that possibility is now available again -- just click the orange "chiclet" at the top right margin labeled "subscribe in a reader" and use the "Get Morning Fog delivered by e-mail" link at the bottom.  After providing your e-mail address you'll get a message with a clickable link to confirm, and it will be set up for you.  Easy! 

Reaching Across The Aisle

In an essay entitled "Reform Across the Aisle" yesterday, Tom Skelly, a former Bush administration official and a former Director of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, proposes yet another self-describedly "bipartisan" health care approach. 

Skelly's proposal naturally suggests scaling back Democratic proposals in several areas, and addressing cost more directly.  On its face, his idea seems reasonable, though some might notice that it seems to omit features whose absence would make the reform meaningless.  But OK, let's take it as a genuine effort to untie the Gordian knot.  I particularly like his point that Congress could pass the Senate bill now, and then pass another bill right away incorporating changes that would appeal to current opponents.  

Granting that the proposal might be reasonable and moderate, however, it's certainly also impractical.  What Skelly ignores is the stonewalling from Republicans on health care generally, and indeed on nearly anything that Obama proposes.  How would he overcome this?  He claims that the changes would "garner some Republican support" but I just haven't seen the evidence of that.  Republicans have played the "no way, no how" response consistently; there is no evidence that they would support anything other than a total defeat of this bill, or the passage of a bill that accomplishes nothing. 

If anyone is going to reach across the aisle, there's got to be a hand on the other side to reach back.  There is absolutely no evidence that it will be there; in fact, there's plenty of evidence that the Republican hand would be snatched away like Charlie Brown's football.  As we have seen, when the President has sought to incorporate Republican ideas (in health as in the deficit commission), leading Republicans have immediately backed away from the ideas they once claimed to support. 

I have to wonder if Skelly (and others who have proposed various ideas for "reaching across the aisle") are really making these proposals seriously, or if they're just being hypocritical.  The answer in this case is Skelly's suggestion that "emboldened by their majority, Democrats have moved away from the middle. They overreached because they could."  That's a fictional account of how we got where we are.  Extreme Democratic positions have been removed from the bill at several stages; Skelly must know better.  

Third World Superpower

I was born early in 1945, the dawn of what we might call the American Age: we emerged from World War II victorious, kicked off an economic boom that seemed it would last forever, saw in the promise of new-age technology endless improvements in health, education, and the general welfare, and came to believe that our active involvement in the world was essential to global peace and the spread of democracy.  Wow.

A lot of that is still true in various ways, but over time I've found my thoughts keep leading back to a nagging sense that we are losing ground in what we once conceived as an uninterrupted climb up the ladder of betterment in various areas of endeavor.  Despite our strengths, or maybe because of them, we tend to think that we can't learn from anyone else, and we ignore (or deny) clear evidence that on many quality-of-life measures, we lag behind our peers - i.e., other developed industrial democracies.

One glaring example is in health care.  Those who declaim that U.S. health care is "the best in the world" are just plain wrong, as many a statistic -- infant death, communicable diseases, access to medical care, life expectancy after adulthood, obesity, cost of care -- will demonstrate.  Fortunately, there is a growing consensus that our health care mess requires our attention. 

Unfortunately, the politics of getting that done demonstrate another weakness we share with less "developed" countries -- a broken political system more focused on partisanship than on achieving real results, and an oligarchy of rich folks and corporations running the country for their benefit rather than the people's.

But that's far from the end of it:  Our education system can't consistently produce kids who can spell, write a basic sentence, figure your change correctly, or locate the United States on a world map.   The middle class is losing its buying power by leaps and bounds. Our transportation infrastructure is crumbling and we won't invest money to fix it.  The number of people still living in poverty is ridiculously high.  And on, and on...

None of this is acceptable for a true "superpower,"  not when less-super powers often perform better on these yardsticks.  And I think some of the malaise so much in evidence today stems from our inchoate realization of that fact.

We can deal with these problems, but first we've got to be honest enough to admit we have them, rather than deceiving ourselves that they don't exist. 

A word about resources:  We often hear that we "can't afford" to deal with basic failings of our economic, health, social, or justice systems.  Not so.  This view is espoused by those actively seeking to turn us into a third-world nation.   First, a growing, recovering economy will quickly start to refill government and private coffers that seem empty now.  Second, we must give up our preoccupation with security hobgoblins.  Defense is essential; warmaking for no better reason than just to eliminate a dictator who once made a fool of our President's daddy is not.  Our military forces must be strong but they need not be constantly deployed.  We can play a leading role in the world through diplomacy, backed by the potential to apply force, at much lower cost.

It's a big subject.  I don't intend to analyze it exhaustively here.  But having outlined it, I've also created a category on this blog for it, and will come back to it from time to time.