Friday, April 30, 2010

The money game

Dino Rossi may, or may not, be running for the US Senate against Patty Murray this year.  My pal Goldy’s most recent thoughts on the subject, posted this morning, indicates that the smarmy real estate huckster may be moving in the direction of running.  Apparently, the dulcet tones of Big John Cornyn, who heads the National Republican Senatorial Committee, have begun to entice Dino into taking the plunge.

If Rossi runs, he’ll lose.  If Rossi doesn’t run, Patty will win big.  In other words, Senator Murray will definitely be reelected come November.

As long as he dithers and ponders, Dino Rossi can’t raise a dime to run for the Senate.  Until he establishes a federal campaign committee, he cannot take in contributions.  Even if he could transfer funds from his Washington campaign committee (which he can’t, because it’s illegal), that would amount to a pittance.  According to his most recent PDC report in November 2009, his gubernatorial campaign had just under $9900 cash on hand.  That’s hardly enough money to buy a couple of computers.  And if Dino thinks he’ll be able to collect a pile of money from the NRSC, which Cornyn has undoubtedly promised him, he’s likely to find himself near the back of a long line of candidates.  After all, the GOP has a lot of seats to defend—Florida, Kentucky, Missouri, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio—and many Democratic seats that are far more vulnerable than ours—Arkansas, Colorado, Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Nevada, Pennsylvania.  With only $15 million in the bank, the NRSC isn’t going to open the vault for Dino.

So let’s say that Dino decides not to run, that he instead wants to make still another (losing) run for Governor.  That would certainly make for an entertaining 2012 as Rossi and Rob McKenna fight it out to face off against Jay Inslee or possibly Lisa Brown.  It would also make for a wide-open struggle among a slew of weak, unknown, and anonymous Republicans to be Patty Murray’s sacrificial lamb.

While money isn’t the be-all and end-all of politics, the campaign-funds gap between Patty and her putative opponents is so vast that it’s almost humorous.  According to the Federal Election Commission, 13 people have filed to challenge Patty Murray for her Senate seat.  (No, Dino Rossi isn’t one of them.) Of those, 11 indicate that they are Republicans, one says he represents no party, and one is shown as “unknown”.  Nine of them are serious enough as candidates that they submitted 1Q/2010 financial reports to the FEC.  To give you an idea of the seriousness-gap between Patty and her opponents, consider the following table, showing cumulative numbers for the entire group:

Candidate Name	Party	Through	Contributions	Own funds	Cash on hand	Debt
Paul Akers	Republican	1Q/2010	$276,323	$237,528	$89,970	$237,528
Don Benton	Republican	1Q/2010	$120,929	-----	$103,694	-----
William Chovil	Unknown	-----	-----	-----	-----	-----
Arthur Coday Jr	Republican	1Q/2010	$61,606	$18,025	$26,313	$18,025
Richard Curtis	None	1Q/2010	$5,853	-----	$1,549	-----
Clint Didier	Republican	1Q/2010	$351,518	$4,800	$151,072	$834
Daniel LeBlanc	Republican	1Q/2010	$100	-----	$100	-----
James Mercer	Republican	1Q/2010	$3,599	$1,644	$1,473	-----
Patricia Murray	Democrat	1Q/2010	$5,471,308	-----	$5,916,995	-----
Rodney Rieger	Republican	4Q/2009	$15	$15	$15	-----
Sean Salazar	Republican	4Q/2009	$52,998	$24,462	$96	$5,644
Edward Torres	Republican	-----	-----	-----	-----	-----
Chris Widener	Republican	1Q/2010	$56,614	-----	$12,308	-----
Craig Williams	Republican	1Q/2010	$18,753	$8,250	$2,626	-----

“Motley” doesn’t begin to describe this bunch.  Only ex-NFLer Didier and State Senator Benton have over $100K in cash-on-hand, and Didier’s bankroll is a mere 2.5% of the pile Patty has amassed.  Akers is completely self-funded, and both Coday and Salazar have put in a serious chunk of their meager funds. 

Were Rossi to join the crowd, he would certainly finish second in the Top Two primary.  After all, he’s the only one in the bunch who’s even slightly known beyond his own family circle.  But he’d still lose to Senator Murray, and he’d undoubtedly cause the NRSC and corporate scumbags to flush some of their money down the toilet of his campaign.  He’d lose (semi)respectably, which would place him quite a bit closer to Patty than any of the rest of them.

Wednesday, March 31, 2010

Practice, practice, practice

This post’s title is the punchline to an old joke.

An elderly New Yorker (often identified as Polish-American pianist Arthur Rubenstein) is approached by a tourist, who asks him, “Pardon me, sir, how do I get to Carnegie Hall?”

"Practice, practice, practice..."

And that’s how it came to pass that, last Sunday evening, my nephew and his oboe debuted at the Isaac Stern Auditorium / Ronald O. Perelman Stage  --  the nation’s most renowned classical music performance space since its opening in 1891  --  at the corner of 57th Street and 7th Avenue in midtown Manhattan.

No, it wasn’t a solo debut, or even a featured debut.  As he continues to progress as an oboist, those may happen at some future date. 

He and dozens of his fellow members of the Garfield High School Orchestra performed as part of Carnegie Hall’s Spring Instrumental Music Festival.  The other performances at the evening’s concert were by the orchestras from Delaware, Ohio’s Rutherford B. Hayes High School and Kirkwood (Missouri) High School.

Alas, I’ve seen only one review of the performance thus far:

They were magnificent  --  my sister

I’m sure I’ll hear much more about the trip, the stage, and the performance when my nephew, sister, and brother-in-law return to Seattle tomorrow night.  In the meantime, to get to Carnegie Hall either “practice, practice, practice” or take the F, N, Q, R, or W train.

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 step

There 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 15th Congressional District since 1955 (well, it was renumbered to the 16th for much of those 54 years, but he had this number at the start and in the present).  He is, in fact, the longest-serving Representative in the history of the House.  Dingell was there when Medicare was crafted and passed.  Even more remarkably, Dingell won the seat upon the death of his father, John D. Dingell, Sr., who had served in the House for 22 years ... ever since MI-15’s creation in 1933.  Ann Arbor, Ypsilanti, Inkster, Romulus, and their environs have been represented in Washington by a John Dingell for over three-quarters of a century!

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 good

I 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…