This Happens Every Day

Either John McCain has the worst advance people in the world, or his policies - and Republican policies in general - are so decidedly aristocratic that they can't help tripping all over themselves.

At his health care policy event yesterday at the H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center & Research Institute in Florida, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) was introduced by the institute’s chairman, former Republican senator Connie Mack. But, as Hotline reports, Mack is more than just a chairman. He’s also a registered state lobbyist “advocating for health insurance companies“.

(By the way, Mack just married Rep Mary Bono (CA-45). Surely that will come up in her re-election campaign.)

This has happened at virtually every McCain appearance recently. Last week he rode on and praised a ferry which was created with an earmark. He went to Youngstown, Ohio and praised NAFTA at a factory that was closed after NAFTA was enacted. Reality keeps getting in the way of McCain's Presidential hopes.

The funny part here is that the McCain camp tried to deep-six the story:

According to Hotline’s Jennifer Skalka, “the McCain campaign lobbied On Call feverishly to tank” its reporting on Mack’s role as a lobbyist, calling the story “ludicrous, absurd and ridiculous.”

I guess Ms. Skalka didn't get any of that yummy BBQ, or she would have known her place.

Later in the day, McCain blamed the Minnesota bridge collapse on runaway spending and earmarks - not that Republicans have gutted infrastructure spending at all - then was presented with an earmark that, gosh, saved lives.

On the same day, McCain was confronted with an earmark he did consider worthy. During a forum at Lehigh Valley Hospital, he met a woman with ovarian cancer who was treated in a clinical trial funded with $80 million in congressional earmarks.

The hospital was showing off an electronic medical records system that is virtually paper-free.

McCain insisted he was not trying to have it both ways and said that deserving projects can get money through regular channels.

"It's the process I object to," he said. "I'm sure that I can give you a list of projects the Mafia funds, and they would probably be good projects. But I can't give you a justification for the Mafia. I can't give you a justification for the corruption that's been bred which has sent members of Congress to the federal prison," he said.

I'm sure the Republicans who turned the earmark process into their personal favor factory in the 1990s are going to be so eager to campaign for McCain now. You know, after being compared to the Cosa Nostra and all.

On top of that, McCain has gone from a position against spending to a position against the technical process by which spending is achieved. That's going to really bowl them over on the stump. McCain wants to make himself the grand poohbah deciding what spending is OK and what spending isn't. The problem is that when he is put to the wall, he can't come up with more than a scattered few projects that are verboten. And he doesn't dare touch that sacred cow, the military budget, which is responsible for about 100 times the wasteful spending as earmarks.

McCain has put himself in a terrible position. Plenty of earmarks provide tangible benefits for people. Every campaign stop, he's going to be confronted by someone. And he'll have to say "Well, when I say cut spending, I don't mean THAT," and this is why his trillions and trillions of dollars in tax cuts for the wealthy and new spending will never be brought into balance. He is dangerous and fiscally irresponsible.

Also, his health care plan will bankrupt a lot of sick people.

McCain is offering people like (Elizabeth) Edwards what he calls a "Guaranteed Access Plan." But unlike all those awful big-government entitlements the Democrats are promising--you know, the ones that (supposedly) make you wait in long lines and cut off access to high-technology treatments--McCain says his plan will let the states handle the problem by working hand-in-hand with private insurers to offer insurance for people with pre-existing conditions [...]

It all sounds very lovely--unless you know something about health care policy, in which case it sounds absolutely preposterous.

More than 30 states already have programs almost exactly like the one McCain just sketched out. They are called "high risk pools," and the idea is pretty straightforward: Private insurers agree to sell policies directly to individuals, even those with pre-existing medical conditions, as long as the state helps to subsidize the cost.

But the whole reason conservatives like McCain prefer this approach to liberal schemes for universal coverage is that it involves minimal government regulation. As a result, private insurers have enormous leeway in dictating the terms of coverage. And one place they use that leeway is by setting high prices. A few years ago, a Commonwealth Fund study found that, on average, state high-risk pools offered coverage that was two-thirds more expensive than regularly priced coverage. In some states, the high-risk coverage was actually twice as high as regular coverage.

At those prices, you might think the coverage was spectacular. Not so. While private insurers in high-risk pools are willing to accept people with pre-existing conditions, they're not generally willing to cover expenses related to those pre-existing conditions--at least not right away. Nearly all the plans surveyed had waiting periods of between six months and a year, during which the insurers would not cover care for prior medical problems.

Between out-of-pocket expenses, deductibles, cost-sharing, and treatment not covered by high risk pool plans, someone like Elizabeth Edwards, with her breast cancer, would probably have to pay around $100,000 under McCain's plan. She has it; most cancer patients don't.

Someone's going to ask him about that on the trail, too. And it'll be another embarrassment. In fact, the only way McCain's bankrupt domestic policies will not cause one misstep after another is if he confines himself to whistle-stop tours of gated communities and medieval castles.

Death By Tax Cut

Rick Perlstein, who's obsessed over sinkholes and the connection to our broken infrastructure, highlights this bit about which I was unaware:

When I read this on this weekend's floods in today's New York Times I did a double take:

In Minnesota, Governor Tim Pawlenty said six people had died, some of them when their vehicles fell into sinkholes in roadways...

The astonishment: As many as six more! That would make for a death toll from faulty roadways in Minnesota of possibly a dozen in Minnesota over a three-week period alone—two years after Tim Pawlenty put on a dumb show for Grover Norquist style conservatives, holding up a giant prop "VETO" stamped as he cancelled an extra $300 million a year for the Minnesota Department of Transportation because it involved a small tax increase. As I wrote two weeks ago, he addressed himself at the ceremony to the public-spirited Minnesota legislatures who dared suggested that Minnesota's roads and bridges needed work: "How dumb can they be?"

In fact, we now know that this love of ideological conservatism over public safety stopped the bridge in Minnesota from being fixed even after they knew it was in bad shape:

The men and women whose job was to ensure the safety of Bridge 9340 were meeting once again. Just after noon on Dec. 6, they filed into a conference room in Roseville to divvy up the final prep work for a dangerous steel reinforcement project high above the Mississippi River.
A senior engineer was going to pull property records in order to contact landowners beneath the bridge. Detours were coming for West River Road. The Coast Guard was about to get heaps of paperwork on what tasks would be done from the river channel. Truck drivers would soon learn of pending weight restrictions.

It appeared that the most studied bridge in Minnesota, the focus of worrisome inspection reports for a decade, was finally going to have its most glaring weaknesses fixed.

But five weeks later, all those preparations stopped. In a single conference call on Jan. 17, the same consultants who said reinforcement plates were needed to strengthen the bridge cautioned MnDOT that drilling for the retrofit could weaken it.

"That was the turning point. That's where we turned the ship 180 degrees," said state bridge engineer Dan Dorgan.

Internal MnDOT documents reviewed by the Star Tribune reveal that last year bridge officials talked openly about the possibility of the bridge collapsing -- and worried that it might have to be condemned.

They knew. And if you read the whole article you'll see suggestions that money was a consideration in halting the fixes. So we can now put a price on the 6 lives that were lost when the bridge collapsed. As if it's less expensive now to rebuild the whole thing.

Conservatives are the least patriotic people imaginable. A patriot would actually try to do something for their fellow American, rather than leaving them in danger. Right-wing policies of abandoning responsibility have led to deaths and suffering, and also a need to spend MORE to fix the responsibilities previously abandoned. It's dangerous and stupid.

Shorter, Sicker, and Dead Sooner: Why Centrism Is Killing Us

Really, what has happened to this country? We're smaller...

U.S. adults lost their position as the tallest people on Earth to the Dutch, who average about two inches taller than the typical American. In fact, American men now rank ninth and women 15th in average height, having fallen short of many other European nations.

"Americans, who have been the tallest in the world for a very long time, are no longer the tallest," said John Komlos of the University of Munich, who has published a series of papers documenting the trend. "Americans have not kept up with western European populations."

Our life expectancy is greatly diminished:

Americans are living longer than ever, but not as long as people in 41 other countries.

For decades, the United States has been slipping in international rankings of life expectancy, as other countries improve health care, nutrition and lifestyles.

Countries that surpass the U.S. include Japan and most of Europe, as well as Jordan, Guam and the Cayman Islands.

"Something's wrong here when one of the richest countries in the world, the one that spends the most on health care, is not able to keep up with other countries," said Dr. Christopher Murray, head of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington.

We're fatter...

Adults in the United States have one of the highest obesity rates in the world. Nearly a third of U.S. adults 20 years and older are obese, while about two-thirds are overweight, according to the National Center for Health Statistics.

And our kids die young at an alarming rate:

A relatively high percentage of babies born in the U.S. die before their first birthday, compared with other industrialized nations.

Forty countries, including Cuba, Taiwan and most of Europe had lower infant mortality rates than the U.S. in 2004. The U.S. rate was 6.8 deaths for every 1,000 live births. It was 13.7 for Black Americans, the same as Saudi Arabia.

These are very dangerous problems for a country to have. Some would consider them the product of decadence, of a rich society that rests on its laurels, grows fat and happy, and allows the world to pass them by. But I think there's more at work than that. Consider, for example, the fact that the only man in the country that gets his full allotment of vacation time is the President of the United States. Most of us don't use up our annual meager vacation time at all. We're not fat and happy, we're overworked and driven, fat because we spend all day in front of our desks, distracted by Paris Hilton's conspicuous consumption and the entertainment media's shoving it in our face to want to reach her level by consuming more and more, in turn making us a culture of worker bees who shut up and go shopping.

And this is a direct antecedent of a political culture that reflexively resists change and supports only the most narrow of solutions.

America's shrinkage in height and life expectancy relative to the rest of the world has at least partially to do with the fact that we're the only industrialized nation on Earth without a universal health care system. What passes for a radical solution to this problem, in the boundaries of acceptable discourse, is something like John Edwards' public/private competition idea, which puts for-profit insurance companies and government-run healthcare plans before Americans, and offers them the choice of either. This may eventually create a universal, not-for-profit system. But imagine if Margaret Thatcher, a conservative, offered this up as a policy prescription in the United Kingdom. There would be riots in the streets if she attempted to give away part of the healthcare system to for-profit private enterprise.

Part of this is the fact that we're moving toward a fairer healthcare system from a for-profit one, while in England it would be the opposite. But clearly, the band of options within the bounds of acceptable discourse are incredibly narrow in this country. Anyone offering real change against entrenched interests is dismissed as a not very serious person, including Edwards, even though he winds up to the right of every self-described conservative in Europe. I submit that this is a direct cause of the fetish of centrism. There is an elite political class in America who believes that the best policy, by default, is the policy which merges various proposals into a bipartisan stew. This not only ends up with a whole that is far lesser than the sum of its parts, but prevents any big, meaningful change on the challenges facing the nation. Conservatives and liberals don't bicker for the sake of bickering - they have substantive differences about where they want to take the country, and the "third way" is often the worst possible way to address those differences. Therefore our political leaders feel the need to create some triple bank-shot compromise on health care as a STARTING POINT for the debate. The same on immigration. On energy. On a host of issues. And as a result, people get shorter, sicker, and dead sooner than other places around the world. Our quality of life suffers, because the dog-eat-dog nature of America's subsidized, unregulated economic structure is still so prevalent and unquestioned among our elites. Our financial markets remain wedded to their suicide pact with speculation because elites help their own by rejecting their so-called "principles" of personal responsibility and bailing out their friends and neighbors to maintain stability, which is code for the rich staying rich and the poor staying poor. Our internal infrastructure, and quality of life improvements for large masses of people, are neglected because the views of the "serious" foreign policy establishment and the defense-industrial complex remain ascendant among bipartisan centrists, meaning more war, more military buildup and less money in the budget for anything else.

We have one party that is openly hostile to any progress whatsoever, even in the realm of basic settled science circa 1859, and we have another party that too often listens to the views of establishment Beltway elites who block meaningful change in the name of "centrism." Markos really got to Harold Ford when he connected John Breaux and the DLC's embrace of the Bush tax cuts to the bridge collapse in Minnesota. That was a piercing truth. When centrism rises, the country crumbles because the status quo is maintained and nothing of meaning gets completed. When unity is the only thing valued, you see crackpot ideas, like needing the indiscriminate murder of 3,000 citizens to happen again to get the groupthink going, given serious scrutiny, and ideas like providing for the basic needs of people laughed off as terribly unserious or communist or worse.

The rejection of this fetishized centrism, this desire for an oligarchy of self-elected elites, has already started in the country, but the entrenchment is so deep, and the links to the will of transnational corporations so intense, that it will take a concerted effort for decades to break the back of this dangerous ideology and get the country moving again. We still do have a working conservative majority thanks to the bias toward the status quo represented by our centrist elites. We are starting to see change here but the progressive movement cannot let up for a minute.

Feeling Minnesota

So if I was an African-American still living in a trailer in New Orleans, and I caught wind of the fact that the President snapped to attention immediately after the death of five people in predominantly-white Minnesota, it wouldn't matter to me that the dead included a Native American and a Hispanic, it wouldn't matter that the district where the bridge collapse occurred is very diverse and is represented by the only Muslim in Congress, Keith Ellison, none of that matters. It would reinforce my opinion that George Bush doesn't care about black people.

And another thing. What Steve Soto said:

In the immediate aftermath of the Minnesota bridge collapse, one of the first talking points to come out from the White House and the GOP spin machine was a charge that Democrats were trying to take political advantage of the tragedy by talking about past GOP under funding at the state and national level. It suddenly became off-limits for the Democrats to point out that Governor Tim Pawlenty and George W. Bush had borne full responsibility for the sorry state of Minnesota’s highways because of their mutual and well-documented insistence that user taxes and taxes of any kind not be raised to maintain or improve infrastructure, and that such needs be met through the current inadequate levels of funding.

This tactic of preemptively deflecting politically damaging attacks by smearing your opponent for taking political advantage of a situation is a part of the Rove/Luntz playbook, and has been in use for well over a decade as a defense mechanism. Whenever you hear any Republican warn Democrats about “taking political advantage” of a tragedy it means that they know they are responsible for the tragedy. It is a tactic they used to defend themselves immediately after Katrina, and it is a warning from the same people who politicized Jessica Lynch, Pat Tillman, and every terror threat warning of the last six years.

When tragedy occurs is the PERFECT time to "politicize" it, since to the GOP politicize means talking about it. When the nation is at attention, these ideas must be discussed. Otherwise we sink back into apathy and nothing changes.