Thursday, February 25, 2010
That was some Summit
Suffering at home with a head cold, I had the opportunity to watch today’s White House Health Care Summit in real time. As is obvious from the commentaries careening around the airwaves and the blogosphere, observers saw in the event that which they wanted to see. To my mind, what happened today was actually more a case of greasing the skids for passage of a bill on both sides of the Capitol Building, of the President telling the House and Senate “You will work this out, period.” He reminded the legislators, time and time again, that going ahead with the construction of a more rational healthcare system is an exigent national necessity.
Many of my progressive and liberal brethren have taken to excoriating the President and the Democratic majority for not magically creating the sort of system that we’d like—if not single-payer, at least a robust public option. At the risk of being accused of Blue Doggery or Conservademism, or selling out to the corporate elite, I’ve understood all along that the sausage-making legislative process can be frustratingly slow, heavily laden with deals and compromises. To say nothing of the appreciable differences between the House and Senate versions of the HCR bill.
Political newbies, those millions of Americans whose only real experience with the system had been participation in the 2008 primaries and election campaign, had and have no familiarity with the nitty-gritty of developing and passing legislation. I’m no grizzled veteran of the political machine, but for almost 10 years I worked closely with a federal agency (CMS, née HCFA) and with the lobbyists for the national association of Medicare QIOs. Several posts here focused on my QIO jobs—“Have a magical day..." (February 2003), Scully ... The X-Administrator Files? (August 2003), Medicare flim-flam from the Orwell Administration (September 2004), Wi-Fi on the beach (June 2005).
So I’m more than passingly familiar with regulations and legislation. In addition, I cut my primary/elections teeth one Presidential cycle earlier, with the Dean campaign in 2002-2004. Whether that makes me knowledgeable or jaded (it could, of course, be both) is a conclusion I’ll leave up to you, the viewer.
My catch-phrase in the HCR saga, through all the highs and (more numerous) lows of its meanders through the halls of Congress, has been Lao-tzu’s
The longest journey begins with a single stepThere have been federal efforts to create a more rational healthcare system for decades and decades. Whether you trace it back to Theodore Roosevelt or his cousin Franklin, there has been only very limited success. In actuality, over those many years no HCR legislation has made it through Congress except Medicare and Medicaid in 1966. In the 40-plus years since, those programs have been slightly expanded and somewhat tweaked, but no new programs or real system modernizations have been seen.
In 2010, then, with a teetering world economy, the still-festering lesions of the poisonous Bush years, immense deficit spending, a Republican Party devoted solely to obstructing anything proposed by the Democrats (even provisions originally proposed by Republicans), corporatist conservative Democrats, Senatorial timidity, and tactical errors by the Obama Administration, it’s astonishing that we’re on the brink of taking that hugely-difficult small step. But after the Summit today, I’m increasingly confident that the House and Senate leadership will be able to collaborate to build a reasonably strong bill for the President to sign. IMHO, during the Summit Obama regularly schooled the GOP. And several Democrats (Tom Harkin, Dick Durbin, Charley Rangel, Nancy Pelosi) made strong, albeit emotional and anecdotal, remarks.
For me, though, perhaps the most meaningful speaker was this one, especially in his closing statement:
John D. Dingell, Jr. has represented Michigan’s 15
Dingell’s Biblical reference directly addresses another of my favorite aphorisms for this Session of Congress, from Voltaire:
The perfect is the enemy of the goodI bet he’d find common cause with the one referenced earlier. Heaven knows he’s been there, looking for a way to take that single step, for a long, long time.
Saturday, January 02, 2010
Seven years ... and counting
Seven years ago, to the day, I wrote the first post on Peace Tree Farm. It included the following:
Whatever I happen to discuss, my viewpoint will be one of seeking rationality, of following the subject to its logical conclusion ... even if that logic sometimes takes us to a reductio ad absurdum. It’s a viewpoint tempered by 50-some years of living, by two years residence in the Pacific Northwest after spending most of my days in the Northeast, by a career of research into healthcare and the quality thereof, by Woodstock and the assassinations, by close observation of governments in action, by Herman Melville and Bill James, by Bob Dylan and Dan Bern, and by much, much more.My viewpoint remains pretty much the same, even as I approach 60-some years and even as I close in on nine years as a Seattlite.
As for the examples of what I might opine about, I haven’t written very much about healthcare quality (nor do I work in that particular field any more). Woodstock was my subject on its 40th anniversary, and also an important part of my post on the 30th anniversary of Nixon’s resignation. The murder of John Kennedy has been recalled on four anniversaries thereof—2003, 2004, 2006, and 2008.
Except for the reference on Opening Day, I haven’t said a word about Melville. Moby Dick is on my re-reading list, but I can’t promise that its author will be on my topic list any time soon. Though I’ve written often about baseball, particularly in the recent years of Phillies ascendance, Bill James has made only a single, peripheral, appearance in a blog post hereabouts. In contrast, Dylan has graced these pages regularly. I marked his 64th and 65th birthdays, expressed my amazement when he did some bizarre TV ads, and referred to him or his lyrics any number of times over the years. Finally, I was surprised how rare were my mentions of Dan Bern. Though I wrote a post extolling one of his finest songs, there hasn’t been all that much more about Dan. If he ever comes back this way on tour, I’ll be sure to put up a post about it.
In any case, the Peace Tree Farm blog now moves into its eighth year of existence. I won’t pretend to suggest that my words have been of any great value to the world at large. After all, although this was the Pacific Northwest’s first liberal blog—Dave Neiwert wrote the first entry on Orcinus six days after PTF’s debut—it may also be its smallest and least significant. Hell, in these seven years I’ve drawn about as many visits and page views as DailyKos gets in two or three hours. Insignificance ‘R’ us!
Thursday, December 31, 2009
Good riddance to the Not-Aughts
In just a few hours, we’ll be ringing in a new year. Hanging on my kitchen wall will be a new Ansel Adams calendar, replacing the just-completed edition, awaiting events and appointments to be filled in over the next 365 days.
It’s not just the year that’s ending, though. We’re about to start a new decade as well. Now, I’m ordinarily of the xxx1-xxx0 school of decade-counting, mostly on account of the no Year Zero rule. Until this fall, that rule also conveniently placed the most recent World Series victory by the damnYankees in a previous decade ... and in a previous century. It was fun to say of the Yanks, “oh, they’re just so last-century. Unfortunately, that snark doesn’t work any more.
But let’s face it—the decade of the 2000s, defined here as 2000-2009, really, really sucked. No need to enumerate the disasters, both natural and man-made, that befell our little planet over the last ten years. Even if switching over to a 2000-2009 decade marker results in Yankee bookends on the decade, we need to put this one behind us ASAP. So, good riddance to the first decade of the 21st century. Don’t let the calendar hit your butt on the way out.
It was such a sucky decade that we never even named it. I mean, I’ve lived through the Fifties, Sixties, Seventies, Eighties, Nineties, and ... what? The equivalent decade of the 20th century was unambiguously known as the Aughts. In my childhood, older people would often speak of, say, the Wright Brothers’ first flight occurring in “nineteen-aught-three”. But nobody ever used, or uses, “aught” in describing the years of the decade we’re finishing.
It’s also quite unusual to hear anyone use such constructions as “twenty-number”, or even “twenty-oh-number”, for years in this century. The latter was assuredly the common terminology for the 20th century analogue of the last decade, and the former was the standard for the remainder of the century. Instead, what we’ve heard over the last ten years is usually in the “two thousand-and-number” format.
Most likely, the rest of the 21st century will follow the conventions of previous centuries. “Twenty-ten”, “twenty-eleven”, and such roll off the tongue much more naturally than either “"twenty-oh-nine" or “two thousand-and-ten”.
So, as indicated in the title, good riddance to the Not-Aughts. Happy New Year, all!
And, coming up in just a couple of days, Peace Tree Farm marks its seventh blogiversary…
Friday, November 20, 2009
Ventriloquism
Hey, look at that! I got Goldy to speak for me on 2009 voter turnout…
In actuality, we’d been talking about the general election and the (mis)perception of low turnout in King County for quite some time. Goldy had previously written a couple of “election factoids” (here and here) as a followup to his earlier rants (here and here) about the Washington Secretary of State’s crusade against the state’s current “postmark” deadline for casting ballots.
For reasons that are no longer completely clear to me, those conversations inspired me to undertake the analysis he discusses today—voter turnout in this month’s big-city mayoral elections. The spreadsheet and its data analysis are my work, but Goldy draws his own conclusions (and turns his own phrases) about what can be seen in those numbers.
I will point out that it wasn’t always easy to find the information presented in my spreadsheet. For some cities, I had to go to the precinct-level canvass report to locate the total number of ballots cast (including blanks undervotes), and/or the voter registration data. That entailed summing up the values from each precinct to derive an otherwise-unreported city count. Thankfully, none of the cities in which such machinations were necessary have anywhere close to the ~1000 precincts here in Seattle. Whew!!
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
Lest we forget
Today is, of course, Veterans Day. Today, we honor those who served in the armed forces of our nation, in wartime and in peacetime.
I remembered, as I do every year, that November 11 is Veterans Day. I remembered as well that it was originally called Armistice Day, as a commemoration of the agreement to end hostilities in the Great War (that is, World War I). At the eleventh hour, on the eleventh day of the eleventh month.
What I forgot this morning is that today is a no-work holiday for me.
My first clue might have been that only one other person stood at my bus stop when the 7:51 run turned the corner to pick us up. But that’s happened before. And perhaps I might have thought something was different when relatively few passengers boarded at later stops, but that too has happened before. At the downtown stop where I changed to a different bus, and going up the hill to my workplace, I again failed to note that anything was different about the day.
Even when I walked past the entrance to my building’s underground parking garage and saw that its gate was closed, I did little other than wonder whether there might be construction or flooding or some other problem down there.
It suddenly all made sense when I got to the building’s front entrance ... and found that the door was locked.
I knew that the University of Washington and related organizations trade a federal holiday for the day after Thanksgiving, and it had somehow gotten into my mind that the traded holiday was Veterans Day. In a flash, as I pulled at a door that wouldn’t open, I remembered that our traded holiday is instead Columbus Day!
Sheepishly, I retraced my bus trip. So I’m back at home now, prepared to enjoy a relaxing day off. I missed the blessed opportunity to sleep in, but I won’t miss a delectable midweek lunch at nearby Paseo Caribbean. Mmmmmmmmm…
While we’re not forgetting, let’s hail the 120th anniversary of Washington’s admission to the Union as the 42nd state. On November 11, 1889.
