Singer to be Hanged at Sunrise

Two links to the debate that never should have been, the tempest in a teapot, the much ado … Jeff at Speedkill, who nails it, and Budge, who is totally bought in.

What fools we bloggers be, how silly we are wrapped up in our fantasies of importance. Who reads this shit? I’ve got to remind myself now and then that I do this because writing and arguing are fun. Never take self seriously, never take blogging to be anything more than a form of mental mast … oh well, you get the point.

Warren Buffet on the Tax System

From Huffington Post:

Warren Buffett sat down with Tom Brokaw on “NBC Nightly News” last night to discuss his problems with the US tax structure. He described an informal poll of his office, where the average tax rate was 32.9 percent, compared to his 17.7 percent, citing that as evidence that “the tax system has titled toward the rich in the last 10 years.”

This is probably correct and doesn’t surprise me at all – Warren Buffet pays tax at approximately half the rate that his secretary does. That’s how it works, that’s how it’s designed to work, that’s the elephant in the kitchen, the thing we walk around and never discuss. The rich are not overtaxed – the middle is.

Collapse

Living in Bozeman, Montana, it’s hard to grasp the full extent of our health care crisis. We have adequate care here, though if one is uninsured, he might be well-advised to avoid it. And surely there is an underbelly here I am not seeing – the waiters and cooks and unemployed, pre-Medicare retirees and low-income self employed who don’t have insurance. Let the market work, they say, and it will fix all these woes. How? They don’t say. Osmosis.

I’m in the middle of a book, Sick, by New Republic editor Jonathon Cohn. It’s well-written and interesting. Cohn starts each chapter by introducing us to individuals with medical problems, and then deftly takes us to the larger problems and back again. It’s compelling reading on an unpleasant subject.

Most of the problems center on our insider-outsider based rationing system, where the very best coverage goes to those with insurance or Medicare. What is left over covers our ever-increasing working class and poor sectors – lousy care or no care with financially stressed hospitals morphing into collection demons. All of this while George Bush attempts to fix malpractice, as if.

Cohn gives what seems to be an objective history of health care in the United States, from the early days of the insurance concept to the pricey private companies that now eat up our health care dollars. He’s not anti-insurance by any means, and gives full credit to the wonderful work that Blue Cross Blue Shield has done over the years until their recent conversion to for-profit status. Catholic hospitals have performed miracles over the years, but are stressed now as they attempt to remain viable while competing with for-profit corporations that can be selective about who they choose to treat. And Medicaid and S-chip have performed a valuable service, though they are underfunded and under financial pressure in every state.

Back to Bozeman, and my own insulation from the giant nationwide quagmire. In a middle chapter, Cohn takes us to Los Angeles, where state and local government attempt to help with the problem inadequate health care for the underclasses. Here’s the seamy side:

Glorida Montenegro had been experiencing a stomachache for several days, and was hoping it would just go away. But when the pain became intense, she feared it might be a real emergency, and she went to the only hospital she knew would take her: County. As Gloria tells it, a member of the staff – Gloria doesn’t remember whether it was a doctor, a nurse or somebody else – asked her about her condition and instructed her to sit tight, offering some Maalox to settle her stomach for the time being. Then Gloria waited. And waited. Ten hours passed, and as Gloria looked at the woman sitting next to her – who appeared to be bleeding from a miscarriage – she decided it might be another ten hours, or more, before the hospital finally got around to her. She had her husband take her back home, and she eventually recovered; but she still got a bill for nearly $1,000. After persuading the hospital to reduce it by a few hundred dollars, she ended up paying it over several months.

Gloria and her husband work two jobs that do not offer insurance, and make in total about $25,000 per year. Market solutions abound – right? Why, they can simply make more money by getting raises or taking on second and third jobs, or can buy private insurance from a wide array of choices – oh, wait, think again. There are only so many hours in a day, they have a child, and the insurance is beyond their means, and anyway, Tony, her husband, has diabetes, and no self-respecting insurer would touch him even if he could afford the coverage.

Anecdotal? Yes, of course. Typical, Yes, emphatically so. In 2003 a group of frustrated doctors claimed that at least four patients in LA County had died because of long waits for hospital beds. A subsequent study found they would have died anyway, but also cited horrifying cases of waits of 25 hours or more up to seven days for access to a hospital bed for conditions ranging from tuberculosis to AIDS to schizophrenia.

That’s medical care for the underclasses. They don’t get regular checkups, and don’t go to the doctor for minor ailments. When something is wrong, they go to the emergency rooms, which are fitfully overcrowded. The waits are interminable. If they are lucky, there won’t be a bill, as there is compassion in our strapped society. But hospitals, trapped by the ever-burgeoning uninsured population, cannot afford to care for them for free and are getting tough about payment. There’s a cadre of attorneys now who do nothing but enforce collection on people like Gloria.

In the end, people live with ailments, forego drugs and treatment, and die prematurely because our system is broken. And the market cannot fix it. The market is doing what it does quite well – we have a first-class system of health care for insiders. I can currently afford insurance (though Blue Cross is saying they need a 32% premium increase from me – I may be on the outs) – I get excellent care. I’m one of the lucky ones.

Let the market work, and this system will continue to get worse, and will eventually crash. It is crashing right now. What galls me is the attitude I encounter, most recently from Dave Budge, that all of the problems of our system are caused by government, and if left alone, the market would fix it.

Quite the opposite.

Notes On Being Run Over By a Motorcycle

I reported below (“When Compromise Doesn’t Work“) on meetings that were going on over the rules of use for nine trails close to Bozeman. I wish I had some good news.

I’ve sat now through three of the meetings, and hikers and stockmen are losing their shirts. It’s all a well-earned defeat. Hikers, not wanting to appear confrontational or strident, have been most accommodating to the motorheads. Stockmen, who seem disingenuous, might actually be motorheads in drag. At this writing, they have given away quite a bit.

What interested me most in this process was the cool professionalism that the motorheads used in ramming their agenda through. They stated openly that they wanted five days of motorized use on every trail close to Bozeman, and that their demands were “nonnegotiable”. The proscribed counter-tactic to such an obstinate position would be to be equally obstinate. Then, if motorheads were to bend a bit, hikers could too. That would expose the intransigence of the motorized set, and clear the way for sincere haggling.

But instead we got the typical right wing circus, the orchestrated chorus of voices yelling out that hikers (hikers!) were not negotiating in good faith. Sadly, it worked. Rather than confront them head on, hikers yielded. At the end of the last meeting, they had been reduced to four or five days out of 21 on three trails. Five hiker days had been taken off the board in total. Then one guy had the balls to stand up and face the two negotiators for the hikers and say “Can’t you people BEND a little bit?”

One of the ploys used by motorheads has been to post a map of the Gallatin Forest showing how many miles of trails they “lost” in the recent travel plan. That’s why they think they have the right to take over local trails.

Here’s what happened – motorheads are small in number, but politically connected. Whenever a public process did not give them what they wanted, they ran to Conrad Burns or Denny Rehberg, and the Forest Service, under pressure from above, would yield. As a consequence, they made inroads into every area of the forest, and hundreds of miles of trails were opened up to them. But they don’t belong – the machines are obnoxious and destructive. In the most recent travel plan, the public demanded and got reductions in the number of trails they could access. The public won out – the vast, overwhelming majority of people who participated in the travel plan wanted them out.

Last I heard, local motorhead Kerry White was trying to put together a lawsuit to undo the travel plan. Absent Conrad Burns, it’s his best alternative.

In fairness, hikers went into the process in good faith. They expected horsemen to be natural allies. (They weren’t.) They expected bikers to oppose motorcycles. (They didn’t.) Landowners don’t even belong at the table, as no private land is at issue. But they too seemed to want to ally with motorheads. It was a stacked process. Dierdre, the professional moderator, wants only harmony, and at any price. Christine, the Forest Service representative, keeps telling us that all uses, including motorcycles, are considered appropriate. She seems blind to incompatibility – it’s as if she thinks that motorcycling is akin to quietly walking and enjoying nature. They are two incompatible activities.

What is at issue is exclusivity. When motorheads are on the trail, everyone else is off. Sharing is not possible – they control by default. Hikers can share a trail with anyone – we are non-intrusive and quiet. The Bozeman Daily Chronicle called us “extremists”. That’s the attitude of the hard right wing – you either give into them, or endure name-calling.

The best strategy was to circle the wagons and attack the process as being corrupt. But we were deer in the headlights. We didn’t realize the stridency of the opposition, and the lengths they would go to to get their way. We thought they were reasonable people. We erred, greviously.

As of this writing, hikers have talked among themselves, and appear to be demanding more. I expect that tonight’s meeting will be contentious, but that hikers will not be so accommodating of motorheads. I fully expect that someone will stand up and point out that demanding five days or motorized use on nine trails, to the exclusion of everyone else, is extreme in the extreme. I expect I’ll be the one to say that.

Questions Answered

In all honesty, I’m feeling a little bad about anything I may have done to contribute to the miniature shit storm with this whole Forward Montana thing.  It’s clearer than ever  that Carol’s post was based off of half-truths and assumptions that could have only been pulled from one place (*ahem*), not to mention a ridiculous reliance on an anonymous commenter (Mellon?).

Luckily, people on the left are starting to get fired up about all of this, and between them, most of Carol’s points have been addressed, though she seems to be unable to operate in the comment threads to defend herself.  Here’s a brief summary:

Wulfgar (In top form, might I add…):

And now, so many years later, I find that Matt has been receiving huge bucks from George Soros!  Matt is, according to at least one Special Olympian, laundering funds for Soros, and I haven’t seen a dime.  I feel so used!   He promised me grassroots and all I got was concern for the communities of Montana.  I don’t live in the palatial estates  like Singer.  I can’t singlehandedly arrange rock concerts for the people I own thrown by their friends (I mean really, Singer must own everybody that his politicians have friends who are Rock Stars.)  I can’t start and personally fund organizations three years before they get the big OutOfState bucks.  And I can’t personally circumvent and break rules that don’t exist.  That takes a special kind of guy.  That takes Matt Singer.

From jhwygirl, with appropriate passion:

She frames the Roosevelt Institute as a “Soros-funded conglomeration of think tanks.”

The Roosevelt Institution has an annual budget of around $150,000. Can’t much fund a conglomeration of think tanks with that kind of budget, now can we? (But honestly, if you want to see who’s funded well, check out that link.)

She disses on his 2 year communications director gig at Progressive States Network because they were funded with $30,000 ($30,000! The horror!!) grant from the Proteus Fund, which is separated by how many degrees? Three? Six? Fifty? to George Soros?

Then she goes on to connect the $250,000 grant that Forward Montana got to “Jon and Peter Lewis of Skyline Public Works.”

Skyline Public Works is the baby of Deborah and Andy Rappaport…

From there she takes that lie and ties the Lewis’ false connection to Soros – which she admits didn’t work out too well – and connects Matt to Soros.

But wait! It gets better! She then takes an anonymous post to that first lie-filled post and creates another post about how Matt supposedly had a conversation with a group of strangers, in a public place, bragging about his connections to Soros!

*snip*

I know lawyers are supposed to twist the facts to make the best case they can for their clients…but are they really supposed to lie?

And Jay:

And that’s what Forward Montana works for, too. If you don’t like people participating in our democracy, fine. But how about debating the substantive issues instead of slinging mud, accusing legitimate organizations of being astroturf fronts built for some insidious purpose, without having a shred of evidence to support your allegations? And why repeat these rumors if all you have to go on is some anonymous comments and an unfounded blog post? Did you email Matt and ask him your questions? Have you met any Forward Montana members? Have you attended an event? Do you know what a 501c4 organization is?

And Finally, Matt (who e-mailed these answers to Dave):

Unless I have a legal reason not to, I respect my members’ right to privacy. That said, other than the Skyline matching grant, we currently have a dozen donors who are at the $1,000 level or more. All dozen (actually, slightly more than that, counting couples) live in Montana.We’ve got a total of roughly 375 members (counting the dozen who have given $1,000+). Of those, all but 27 live in Montana (or at least did when they joined — I haven’t done an accounting of them more recently).

*snip*

As for volunteers campaigning for candidates while working for Forward Montana, they shouldn’t be, unless they’re volunteering for our PAC, which is currently not in operation anyways. For our Beer Brats and Ballots effort, for example, we’ve had to strike a few BBQ hosts because they told us that they would be too likely to tell their attendees whom to vote for.

Not that I needed convincing, but I’m sold.  This shit-storm is artificial in nature.  Unfortunately, most of our dextra pals will choose not to take any of these responses seriously.  I’d be surprised if Carol addressed any of these posts directly.  I’m now seeing the wisdom in leaving these folks to their conspiracy theories. 

Finally, I cannot believe that smart people like Budge and Mike are taking Carol’s post at face value without the slightest hint of scrutiny.   Get over it, guys.  You got nothin’. 

 And I think an apology would be nice.  But who am I kidding?

Silently Forward

I hope most of us on the left are  pleased to see what appears to be an awakening of Montanan right-wing blogging.  I found it strange how the left seemed to dominate the conversation over the tubes, but these last couple of months seem to have told a different tale.  I hope many of us are cheering on this development.  For my part, I find that the discussion around here has gotten much more invigorating.  The great echo-chamber that was the Montana blogosphere was beginning to take its toll on me. 

But now, I’m confused.   First was the Indy’s piece on Matt and Forward Montana, which painted a pretty picture.  This served as the impetus for a bit of a tizzy on the right side of the blogosphere… which is escalating into a full-blown frenzy.  The writing has been good, the emotions hot, and though the overstatements seem to run rampant, it’s hard not to come out of reading all of their posts without a nasty feeling at the pit of your stomach.

First, there was this.  Then this.  Now this and this.  On the left?…

*crickets*

Why?  I’m certainly not saying that silence indicates guilt of any wrongdoing.  Of course, my tendency is to side with Matt.  But, having no knowledge of the specifics of Forward Montana, it’s nigh impossible for me to defend him.  So why won’t he defend himself? 

My first thought was that it must be a David Sirota-esque “your puny blogs are nothing when compared with my might and popularity!!”  But having read Matt’s stuff for a while now, I’ve never gotten that feel from him.  I stopped reading Sirota immediately after seeing how he deals with detractors.  Matt is rarely condescending, and he has responded to critics in the past with thoughtfullness. 

So what can the silence mean?  My bet is that it’s more along the lines of  a “responding to your critics gives their criticisms that much more credence” mentality.  Basically, the idea here is that these criticisms have so little ground in reality and are so emotion-based that it’s worth little to respond to them.  If this is the case, it makes a little bit more sense.

Then again, maybe Matt just hasn’t had any time to respond to them.  If that is the case, I hope something’s coming.

My advice?  The silence can appear damning to your detractors, and can confuse the hell out of your supporters.  Tell these guys how it really is, Matt!  Their posts are making the rounds, and everyone is reading them.  You can’t ignore it forever.

We hit 30,000!

I was just reviewing bog stats (there’s no one out there on Sundays) and saw that today we had our 30,000th view.

We’re a small Montana blog, but it has been fun and will continue.

Target American Public

A relative of ours, who will never read this, walked by me this morning after watching mainstream news, and reported that “Iranians are killing American soldiers”. Yes, indeed, the Americans are getting ready to strike. The lie machine is up and running.

It’s just a reminder of how pervasive right wing propaganda is in this country, and how effective it is.

What Formeth Thee?

Matt Singer has an entry over at Left in the West commemorating the death of Paul Wellstone. That event did not have much impact on me, though I’ve always been suspicious about it. Being a student of American activities in Cuba, Central and South America during the 50-70’s, I’m always suspicous of timely plane crashes (especially given the cynical and power-hungry Machiavellians that currently hold office). Wellstone’s death did swing the senate over to the Bushies. It was indeed timely. I think I give voice to many deeply held suspicions, which will remain silent but shared.

But that’s how it goes in banana republics. I was more intrigued by Matt’s reference to the Wellstone death as a formative event in his life. It made me wonder – what events most impacted me as I was growing up? I’m 57.

For sure, the Kennedy assassination impacted me. I was 13 at the time. My parents were Republican, and my mother said that night that we had a better president as a result. But still I cried. Did it affect my thinking? No. I was only 13 – I would cheer for Barry Goldwater in 1964 and watch in awe and anger as the press crucified him. But the images of Dealey Plaza would leave a scar – my first close encounter with violent death

The Communist scare had a deep impact on me. They actually had us do “duck and cover” in our classrooms. People I knew built bomb shelters, and we were told that our neighbors would shoot us if we tried to get in when the war came. Paranoia about communism was everywhere, and that kind of scare propaganda had deep impact on us kids. It wouldn’t be until my late 30’s (before the fall of the Soviet Union, he hastens to add) that I would finally realize that we needn’t fear communists or Russians, that the whole thing was American propaganda. But scare me it did. (Read the Mencken quote on our masthead above.)

It’s still going on, by the way. Just substitute “terrorist” for “communist”, and you’re right back where I was in those days.

Finally, there was Vietnam. Due to our indoctrination about communism, most Americans blindly supported the war. Me too. I was a high school student in the 1960’s, and we all had the draft hanging over our heads. I pulled a Cheney – I got myself into college. (The Texas Air National Guard was not available to Montanans, and anyway, I didn’t have a rich daddy.) Later they did the draft lottery, and I pulled number 335 or so – my mother would go to Vietnam before me. But the war, the campus riots (which I opposed – contradiction was my middle name), Nixon and Kissinger and Bobby Kennedy and the Dr. King – it all affected me deeply. As Republican as I was, I wept for Bobby – such a dynamic man, so vital, so dead.

I grew up during interesting times.

So tell me, what impacted you? What formed you?

Pray, Rockies, Pray

I got a call on Tuesday from relatives in Denver who suggested I try to get some tickets for the World Series. They were going on sale at noon that day on the Internet. I said I’d give it a try. At about 11:55 I got on the Rockies web site, followed the links, and tried to get in. I got a screen counter – every time I tried to get in and failed, the screen would reset at two minutes, and then automatically try again. Every now and then it timed out, so that I had to manually attempt to enter.

I left it – not much hope here. Later, passing by, I noticed the screen had changed – I took a closer look. I was in!

I had to select seats (best available for $100 each – tickets ranged from $65 to $250), and then wait out interminable waits as the screen rolled through the purchase process. (In the meantime, our Denver relatives were having no luck – I was the only hope.) Finally I got to the window that asked for a credit card number, and I entered it, put the card back in my wallet, and waited. And waited, and waited. Finally it came back again asking for that three digit code on the back of the credit card. I got the card out of my wallet again and entered it.

Wrong card! Wrong three digits! The screen very quickly rolled over and said “invalid card number.” My application was rejected. I hit the back button and entered the correct three digits and tried again, but the shopping cart was empty. The tickets were gone.

I was distraught – I called Denver and told them what happened. They had no luck either. I was that close! I had no choice but to try again – maybe lightning would strike twice. I started the process again.

But wait … I was still in. It rejected those tickets, but wanted me to re-select seats. I hadn’t been booted completely out. There was still hope.

Before I had chosen the Saturday game, but thinking it would be sold out, I changed to the Monday game. I ordered up four more “best available” $100 seats, and to my amazement, got them. This time I entered the correct numbers. I have the tickets in hand this moment.

Our Denver relatives struck out. I got the only tickets our family would get – a maximum of four. Later I learned that 750,000 people had applied for 16,000 tickets – one shot in fifty. I was indeed lucky.

But not so fast – is there going to be a game five? One game, Rox – one stinking game. All you have to do is win one game, and the series goes to five games and we’ll be there on Monday. Previously I have written here about how the Rockies deliberately try to recruit Christian athletes – people with “character”, they call it. Well I’m calling on them now to use their connections to extend this series by one game.

Gentlemen, start your prayer books.