2centsworth.info

It will be interesting to see how Obama matches up against McCain.

I do think McCain deserves credit for his military service and the years spent as a POW. But he was a very junior officer and the most useful thing he gained from getting beaten up in the camps was the ability to identify a bit with the prisoners in Abu Ghraib and Dick Cheney’s Gulag.

John Kerry did his bit in Vietnam too but that didn’t stop GW and his handlers from Swiftboating him… And the voters accepted that from a guy that turned National Guard service into a no-show job!

The Presidency of the United States is the most important job in the world and I am afraid the voters should be a bit ruthless in asking any candidate “What have you done for us lately?” and “What are you going to do for us in the future?”

I actually voted for McCain in the 2000 primary and I was appalled and disgusted by the dirty tricks that the GW folks used to defeat him. But I was even more disgusted when McCain then cozied up to GW for the 2004 election. McCain must despise GW… How could he stomach embracing him on stage?

I imagine the RNC must have whispered in his ear…. Gee, John, if you want support from us in 2008, you better get out there and put on a good show.

So what has McCain done for us lately?

He helped us get another 4 years of GW. He has failed to criticize the grotesquely mismanaged occupation of Iraq. He has said nothing about the rampant corruption and incompetence of the Halliburtons and Black Waters all of which has put US soldiers and marines at risk.

He has not criticized the creation of a bloated Homeland Stupidity department staffed by incompetent political cronies like FEMA’s “Helluva job Brownie.”

OK, he supported the troop surge which seems to have been having some positive effect.

But he never said a word about Rumsfeld firing General Shinseki for suggesting that we needed more troops in the first place.

He has, literally within the last week, discovered that we really are experiencing global warming and maybe we ought to do something about it. Even that sounds like a cobbled up attempt to differentiate himself from the most unpopular president in modern history.

It will be interesting to see who he picks as his running mate. Might I suggest…

McCain-Cheney ‘08

I am so relieved that Obama has won the primary.

Both Bill and Hillary are brilliant, determined, and relentless politicians but it is all about their own ambitions and ego. Bill was a mediocre president… It is only the contrast with his dreadful successor that casts him as anything else.

I have, for some time, felt that the 16 years of Bill and GW will be viewed as an awful watershed in US history. Eight years of Bill’s stagnation and eight years of GW’s corrupt, disasterous incompetence.

Sixteen years of lost opportunities and wasted time that could have been spent dealing with global warming, the energy crisis, and the economic changes brought on by globalization.

Eighty percent of Americans feel the country is going in the wrong direction.

Hillary was never going to be the candidate of change. She is the epitome of what we all despise about Washington DC. The schmoozing with lobbyists, the trading Presidential pardons for contributions to her Senatorial campaign, trading Senate bills for campaign contributions.

And God knows what Bill would get up to if we let him loose in the White House for another four or, I shudder, eight years.

What did he actually do to earn the $109 million dollars he has received since he was last in office? Who are the secret donors that paid for his Presidential library…

And Hillary’s latest performance… “I won’t concede and endorse you unless you offer me the VP slot?”

And all this crap about winning the popular vote if you count Michigan and Florida?

Bill and Hillary have been the two most powerful Democratic politicians for the last 20 years. If they didn’t like the way the primaries were structured or the rules by which the nomination was decided, they had lots of time and certainly the clout to have changes made. They had no problem with any of the rules or procedures… Until they found that Hillary was going to lose according to those rules and procedures. And then suddenly they are weeping over the disenfranchised voters of Florida and Michigan.

This isn’t Al Gore having the election stolen by a bunch of Bush Supreme Court appointees. This was rules and procedures that were created and interpreted by other Democrats.

Hillary is tough. Hillary is intelligent. Hillary is determined. But she is also totally self serving, lacks any integrity, and will do anything to win whatever contest she is in.

I am sorry for the many decent well meaning people who became so invested in her candidacy. Quite bluntly, she is, and always was, unworthy of their support. I can only hope that her churlish behavior of the last few days will make them realize that and that they will come to recognize that they will actually have a much better candidate in Obama come November.

So much for Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s 100 hour blitzkrieg to return Capitol Hill to a higher ethical standard. Not only is she weakening her message by demanding that the Pentagon fly her around in a personal 757… But it is already evident that her new rules designed to curb the influence of lobbyists is an abject failure.

According to today’s New York Times article (Congress Finds Ways of Avoiding Lobbyist Limits by David Kirkpatrick, Sunday February 11, 2007), it has taken congressmen on both sides of the aisle only a few weeks to figure out how to get around the new ethics rules. (Actually, I am sure they knew how to get around them in advance… After all it was the lawmakers who wrote the rules and they were written to have loopholes a mile wide.)

Pelosi’s new rules prohibit lobbyists from treating lawmakers to meals, trips, stadium box seats, or discounted use of private jets. However, according to the article, within the last two months, lawmakers have invited lobbyists to help pay for lavish birthday parties in a lawmaker’s honor ($1,000 per lobbyist), margaritas and martinis at Washington area restaurants ($1,000), a California wine-tasting tour, hunting and fishing trips (typically $5,000), weekend golf tournaments ($2,500 and up)… The list goes on and on…

The trick is that the lobbyists don’t pay the lawmaker directly. Instead the lobbyists pay a political fund-raising committee…which then pays for the lawmaker’s party, trip, etc. Apparently nothing in Nancy Pelosi’s new rules prohibits this… Is she a naive fool or “one of them”?

The New York Times article has the following table:

Join Your Favorite Lawmaker For… (for a “small” contribution)
Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee	Weekend at the Harbor House resort on Nantucket	$25,000
Senator Max Baucus (Dem. Montana)	Skiing or snowmobiling in February or golfing or fly-fishing in the summer	$5,000
Senator Tom Carper (Dem. Delaware)	Skiing weekend at the Ritz-Carleton Bachelor Gulch in Colorado	$5,000
Senator Bill Nelson (Dem. Florida)	Super Bowl Party in Miami	$5,000
Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones (Dem. Ohio)	“Manicures and Muffins” at Capitol Nails in Washington	$2,500
Senator Mel Martinez (Rep. Florida)	Presidents’ Day Weekend at Disneyland	$5,000
Rep. Eric Cantor (Rep. Virginia)	Coffee at Starbucks (four mornings this Spring)	$2,500
Rep. Ron Manzullo (Rep. Illinois)	Valentine’s Day Reception at Landini Brothers in Alexandria, VA	$1,500
Rep. Mary Bono (Rep. California)	Concert by The Who	$2,500 for two
Rep. Vito Fossella (Rep. New York)	Performance of “Mary Poppins” on Broadway	$2,500 for two
Rep. Kay Granger (Rep. Texas)	“Grangertinis” birthday party at a Washington Steakhouse	$1,000

I really like the sound of the “Manicures and Muffins”, myself. For $2,500, I am sure those are really good muffins.

There are a lot of differences between Iraq and Vietnam but it’s probably worth looking back on Vietnam as we consider what course to take in Iraq.

Should we “cut and run” or should we keep sending soldiers and marines over there to secure “peace with honor.”

When our political and military leadership have no clear plan or objective, does it make any sense, and is it morally defensible, to keep on wasting the lives of our rank and file military.

The Bush administration says that if we simply withdraw that it will be disastrous; that Iraq will be a haven for terrorists. Yet I don’t think anyone outside of the White House believes that sending another 20,000 troops to Baghdad for a couple of months is going magically stabilize Iraq. If we’d followed General Shinseki’s advice in 2003 and sent in 300,000 troops and had a less corrupt and incompetent reconstruction effort things might have turned out better. But we didn’t and it’s three years later and it’s really too late now.

Let’s get the troops out before any more are wasted. It’s worth remembering that we lost in Vietnam… The bad guys ended up in control of both North and South Vietnam. And what harm has come of it? It’s thirty years down the road from the fall of South Vietnam and we are now trading partners with Vietnam.

There is no doubt that the Middle East is very different from South East Asia and the mindset and cultural and religious issues are enormously different. It is ironic, about 2 million Vietnamese and over 50,000 Americans died during the war there and yet an American traveler today is probably safer in Hanoi today than he would be anywhere else in the world. That isn’t going to be true in the Middle East; not now, not in thirty years, and probably not ever. Muslim fundamentalism, the Arab/Israeli conflict, Iran’s nuclear ambitions are not going to away and we will have to figure out political and military responses to them all.

But the invasion of Iraq was ill-conceived from the beginning and hopelessly bungled in its execution. It’s time to get our guys out of there and leave the Kurds, Sunnis, and Shiites to sort it out among themselves. We won’t be able to just walk away and forget about it… But we need to back off and find another approach, wait two years until GW and his gang of fools are gone and have a more intelligent and less corrupt President try to sort this out.

Update 31JAN09: Well, we now have a more intelligent, less corrupt President. And a combination of the troop surge and the new policy of reaching out to the Sunni militants has resulted in a much more stable Iraq. Both thanks to General Petraeus and getting rid of Rumsfeld. Now we can, one hopes, get out of Iraq and attend to our unfinished business in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The US healthcare system is a disaster. If you total up all the healthcare costs (government tax dollars, private insurance premiums, etc.), US healthcare costs about twice as much per person as the healthcare in any European country, Canada, or Japan. And yet we have 40 million or so uninsured and on virtually every measure of health, the US ranks close to last of all the developed countries.

So the whole system needs to be changed. But we have all sorts of powerful, enormously wealthy institutions (insurance companies, drug companies, medical diagnostic labs, medical equipment suppliers, etc.) who are making vast amounts of money under the current system. They will resist any changes that they think will threaten the gravy train. And they and their lobbyists have had Congress in their pockets for decades.

There is a growing consensus among the public that the current system is not serving anyone well, not even those of us who have healthcare coverage. So the question is what sort of system to we move to.

To me it seems obvious that we should be moving to a single-payer system that is managed by the government and that guarantees that every citizen gets the same access to care. That’s what almost every other developed country in the world has and, while their systems certainly have problems, the statistics show that their plans are both less expensive and produce better results than what we have.

The opponents of single-payer systems are quick to point out, for example, that Canadians must wait months for routine medical appointments but when US seniors are struggling to find affordable prescription drugs where do the turn… They buy the drugs from Canada. And who is trying to stop them? The US Food and Drug Administration under the influence of the pharmaceutical industry lobbyists. And why are these drugs (most manufactured in the US) cheaper in Canada? Because the Canadian healthplan used their leverage as the sole provider of prescription coverage in Canada to negotiate better prices.

When the Republican Congress created Medicare Plan D they specifically forbade Medicare from negotiating drug prices. So now the Medicare Plan D prices are significantly higher than, for example, the prices charged the Veterans Administration. Why? Because the Veterans Administration is allowed to negotiate drug prices.

So why do I say that there is going to be a battle between “Universal Coverage” and “single-payer”? Because Universal Coverage is a nice sounding name for a Rube-Goldberg mess by which private insurers will be subsidized using tax dollars to provide 2nd-class-citizen coverage for the less affluent members of US society.

We currently have two single-payer plans in this country (Medicare and the Veterans Administration) that appear to work rather well. My understanding is that they are actually more efficient in their administrative costs than private insurers. We should be studying them and the single-payer health plans in place in other countries to try and come up with a single-payer plan that is better than all of them.