Is This Really Possible?

http://a6.unimodal.com

Cruise over to that net address up there. Take a look around the site. Drink it all in. Done? You've looked it over and are confident you have a basic layman's understanding of the concept and technology involved? Good, let's talk about it.

First of all, is there anyone more technical and engineering inclined that can offer an opinion about all the claims made on the site? For instance, the claim that it will cost 10 times less to build than standard light rail. For me, as a complete layman knowing nothing about the actual physical realities involved, this seems almost too good to be true. I know that there are light and heavy rail systems built around the maglev concept, and none of the claims they make are really that outrageous, it just seems like this makes way too much sense to actually be possible.

The second, and actual main thrust of this post, thing I want us to all think about is whether this is feasible economically and politically. My first reaction was that the oil, auto and airline industries would all gang up and strangle this thing in its crib. Then stomp on the crib and sell the pieces as pre-stressed lumber. But thinking about it further, the auto and airline industries, at least, are already about as weak as they've ever been. Add in the fact that this system has a supposed top speed of only 150 mph and there's an argument to be made that it wouldn't really compete with the airlines at all. As for the auto industry, if I were them, rather than picking fights against the public interest at the lowest point in my history, I would concentrate on showing people why they should support me rather than jump ship to some crazy new idea that will never fly. Unfortunately, this kind of technology does at least potentially represent an existential threat to the automobile industry as we know it. So, they'll probably have to try and fight it. The question being whether they have that kind of clout and power left at this point. Doesn't the government essentially own GM right now? Clearly these guys are nowhere near the top of the totem pole right now.

That leaves the oil industry. Arguably, the biggest, most influential of all. They certainly have other irons in the fire then simple gasoline, but they've never struck me as all that interested in simply giving up revenue to help society. Quite the reverse, actually. On the other hand, they've also never struck me as very forward-looking or visionary, so it's possible they won't even see this coming until it's too late. So, I'm throwing this open, and also possibly using it as a test to gauge readership. Comment away on these topics. What coalition of interests will rise to try and thwart this idea? Is it even a real and practical notion to begin with? If so, will the industries arrayed against it succeed in squashing it? Or will this fight even develop in time for an effective battle to be waged? That is, will the industries that should oppose this realize their danger in time to make it a real horse race, or will the American people be smart enough, fast enough to make the opposition of a few out of touch, selfish plutocrats inconsequential?

Kidshowbusiness Solves the Health Care Crisis!

That's right, I'm back, with the solution to all our health care problems. It's incredibly fun and easy, and a lot less expensive then you might imagine. I can't even take credit for the idea, since practically every other industrialized democracy in the world already uses it. It's called a single payer health care system and I honestly can't believe there's even a debate about this, since let me reiterate that EVERY OTHER FIRST WORLD COUNTRY ON THE PLANET ALREADY HAS THIS SYSTEM!!!!

Here's how it works: The government takes a tiny little cut of your paycheck each pay period, you know the way they already do to pay for Medicare and Medicaid (and the same way your employer already does if you have employer based health insurance). The government uses this money to put together (or take over) a national health care system. You receive an ID card in the mail and from that point on whenever you go to the doctor, or the hospital, or to get a prescription filled or whatever you just show them the card and whoever it is bills the government. That's it. That's the whole plan.

By the way, what I'm talking about here isn't extra money on top of what the government and your company is already taking out of your check. I'm saying that instead of Medicare and Medicaid and your insurance company, what we would have is one big National Health Care complex and that is where all the money, that you're already paying, would go. In fact, there's every reason to believe that the amount you'd be paying out of each check would actually go down, rather than up.

There are many reasons for this, but let's start with your insurance company. What does it actually do? Aren't they essentially just a middle-man? A middle-man that gets to tell you which doctor you can go to and what medical procedures you can and can't have? A middle-man that can kick you to the curb if you get too sick, become a financial liability? This doesn't actually sound like a good deal to me. And if you're ALREADY sick, you can't even get in on this terrible, terrible deal. Remember the insurance companies make money collecting checks from healthy people, not paying bills for sickies. If you don't have insurance, and you get sick, you are essentially shut out of our health care system. Let's go over that again. If you're sick, you can't buy a health insurance policy. Aren't sick people the only ones that really need health care? What kind of system is this?

Getting back to the cost issue, a person I know that lobbies for the health care industry (we'll call him the health care company stooge) claims that the insurance industry only takes about 1% of health care spending every year. Doesn't sound like much does it? In fact it sounds like bullshit doesn't it? Well, it might be, but let's use that number anyway. Remember the previous paragraph? What does the insurance industry DO for their 1%? What do they contribute, medically? How do they help patients get well? They actually don't do anything. So, if we get rid of them and turn all their functions over to the government, we've already saved 1% of all health care spending right there. Oh, I'm sorry, we've saved AT LEAST 1%. We did agree that that 1% number sounded like bullshit didn't we?

But won't the new national health service have to duplicate everything the insurance companies do anyway? Won't that cost money? Not exactly. Remember the government is already doing all that with Medicare and Medicaid. Essentially we'd just be expanding that and cutting out the insurance companies. No billing department, since it's all coming straight out of everyone's checks anyway. Consolidating all these different companies saves money in other ways too. Think about all the paper work you have to fill out when you go to the doctor/hospital. Now imagine that multiplied by the number of insurance companies there are out there. That's right, every company has their own form of the same paperwork. Now replace that with one set of paperwork, from the government, that everyone already knows how to process since it will probably be just the Medicare/Medicaid paperwork with a new name at the top.

Then there's the drug companies. Suddenly they're going to find themselves with only one customer. This is what we call "negotiating from a position of strength". Expect prescription costs to go down. The same thing goes for medical technology companies. The only people interested in buying what they have to sell will be the government. Those savings will be passed on to you! Oh, and malpractice insurance. I expect that when all doctors work for the government this won't be nearly as big an issue.

Probably the biggest form of savings will be in the form of preventative care. Currently, if you are without insurance, essentially your only health care option is the emergency room. This is between 10-20% of the country we're talking about here. About 30-60 million people. Somewhere in that range. They don't go to the doctor on a regular basis. No check-ups. No mammograms. No running to the doctor if they have the sniffles. So, nothing gets caught at the check-up stage. They don't find tumors until they've become malignant. They don't run to the emergency room until a cold has become the flu, or the flu has become pneumonia. In other words, up to 20% of the country can't head small health problems off at the pass, which is much less expensive. All their health problems become big health problems. And if they can't afford health insurance, guess what else they probably can't afford? The answer is medical bills.

Do the doctors and hospitals just eat the cost of treating these very large health problems? Um, no. They bump up everyone else's bills to compensate. And then your insurance company raises your rates. The government has to take more out of your check. Or borrow the money probably, but the point is the same. Do you get it? These people that don't have insurance... you're ALREADY paying their medical bills. It's in your interest to make their bills as small as you can. Like say, $100 for an antibiotic instead of $5,000 for a week long hospital stay.

While it would be nice to improve our health care system and save money at the same time, there is always the possibility that opponents raise, namely that the government is so incompetent that a government-run healthcare system would take MORE money from everyone rather than less. To this I say, "meh". Let's suppose the government takes over, and everyone's share of health care expenditures goes up 20%. Well, guess what? Health care costs are rising about 10% a year anyway under our current, broken, system. So, your bill was going to get there anyway without reform, either next year or the year after. And now the government is in a much better position to control costs. Think about it: is the same government that runs around in a circle and screams in terror at the idea of raising anyone's taxes really going to let your health care premiums go up once they're running the joint?

Besides, even though no one likes to talk, think, or hear about it, this is really much more a moral issue than a financial one. 60 million people with no health insurance in this country. How many of them are children? I don't know. Don't think about it. They're not your kids anyway. But, to be clear, we're not talking about illegal aliens or welfare cheats. Most of these 60 million we're talking about (the ones that aren't kids anyway) have jobs. Maybe their employer doesn't offer health insurance. Maybe they're self-employed. Maybe they simply can't afford to pay premiums that go up 10% every year and still buy food, clothing, shelter, etc. For whatever reason, if they get sick, they just have to wait and hope they get better. If their kids get sick, they have to go to the emergency room and then wait for a bill they can't ever pay. While you're waiting for that bill, here's an interesting little tidbit: a 2001 study in 5 states concluded that medical debt contributes to about 47% of bankruptcies. And that was in 2001, before W. finished destroying the economy.

Now, a pointed story with an obvious moral. Once upon a time in this country, there was no such thing as a fire department. If your house caught fire, you and your neighbors did the best you could to put it out before the whole neighborhood burned down. Then some bright fellow came up with the idea of a "fire company". No, this wasn't a company that sold people fire, it was a company that would send qualified fire extinguishment professionals to your house and put it out, if it happened to be on fire already. In exchange for which you payed a small monthly "protection" fee. This model caught on and by the late 19th century most major cities had several competing fire companies. If you were foolish enough to not sign up with one of these companies and your house caught fire, they were all more than happy to rush over and watch your house burn down. Haha, just kidding, in reality they were delighted to put out the fire, as soon as you signed up with their company, which you really, really wanted to do now, didn't you? In a hilarious aside, if more than one company showed up to get you to sign on the dotted line, there were many occasions when, rather than put out the fire, the different companies got into a fistfight about who was going to put out the fire instead. Eventually, it was decided that the "for profit" model didn't really fit with the calling of fire-fighting, and government took over this function.

Now for some boring statistics. This next chunk comes straight from Wikipedia's article on Health care in the United States, so if you don't like it, take it up with them. The good people at Wikipedia write:

"Many have argued that the system does not deliver equivalent value for the money spent. The US pays twice as much yet lags behind other wealthy nations in such measures as infant mortality and life expectancy. Currently the U.S. has a higher infant mortality rate than most of the world's industrialized nations.[nb 1][11] The USA's life expectancy lags 42nd in the world, after most rich nations, lagging last of the G5 (Japan, France, Germany, UK, USA) and just after Chile (35th) and Cuba (37th).[12][13][14] The USA's life expectancy is ranked 50th in the world after the European Union (40th).[15][16]

The World Health Organization (WHO), in 2000, ranked the U.S. health care system as the highest in cost, first in responsiveness, 37th in overall performance, and 72nd by overall level of health (among 191 member nations included in the study).[17][18] A 2008 report by the Commonwealth Fund ranked the United States last in the quality of health care among the 19 compared countries.[19]

According to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences, the United States is the "only wealthy, industrialized nation that does not ensure that all citizens have coverage" (i.e. some kind of insurance).[20][21] The same Institute of Medicine report notes that "Lack of health insurance causes roughly 18,000 unnecessary deaths every year in the United States." [20] while a 2009 Harvard study published in the American Journal of Public Health found a much higher figure of more than 44,800 excess deaths annually in the United States due to Americans lacking health insurance.[22][23] More broadly, the total number of people in the United States, whether insured or uninsured, who die because of lack of medical care was estimated in a 1997 analysis to be nearly 100,000 per year.[24]"

Did you get all that? Basically, we spend more and get less for our money then the other 1st world countries out there. Oh, and in some aspects we get less then countries like Chile and Cuba. Countries that aren't exactly rolling in the dough. Get it? There's something wrong with the way we do things. That's the point. We need a new system.

I'm going to wrap this up by getting back to my original brilliant idea. We need a single payer health care system. We need a system that doesn't spend most of its time making money for private companies and bankrupting individuals. Will a single payer system be perfect? Don't people in countries with this system complain about slower care, or inferior quality of care? In fact, don't people in Canada come down here to get medical treatment?

Okay, I doubt the system will be perfect. It's possible that you might have to wait a little longer for non-urgent care. I very much doubt that quality of care will be an issue. After all, people in Canada come down here to get medical treatment. But probably not as many as we have going to Canada for the same thing. The people in Canada coming down here are basically jumping the line, or paying extra for a procedure their government health plan doesn't cover for some reason (possibly they don't think it works? Whatever). The people we have going to Canada go because it's their only option.

This is supposed to be the greatest country on Earth. All our politicians, regardless of political party say that. So, considering that, and considering that we're already spending more than anyone else, don't you think we might be able to put together a system that manages to serve everyone, while still avoiding the pitfalls other countries have experienced? I mean, we're better than everyone else, and we're already spending more money, so if we switch to the same system they have, should't our version be much, much better? Is this, or is this not, America?

Now, Back To Your Regularly Scheduled Republicans

My friend Bree twittered recently about Sarah Palin. Something along the lines of "Who are these 30% of people that say they would vote for Sarah Palin?" This fits in so well with what I planned to write about that I am using it as my introduction.

Who are these people? These 30% that want Sarah Palin to be our President? Well, in the simplest terms, they are the rank and file of the Republican Party. They are its grassroots supporters, its foot soldiers. Without these people, these 30%, the Republicans stop being a national political party and stand revealed as a rather cutthroat assemblage of business interests along with those few individuals that make up the wealthiest 1% or so of our nation.

They are, generally speaking, evangelical Christians who attend church regularly (probably more than simply once a week). They believe in the power of prayer (I'm not sure which one of them prayed for a black president, but I'm sure the others are all cursing his name). Their religious views dictate many of their political views. For instance, they oppose gay rights and abortion, but they support the death penalty. Because it's in the Bible. Despite the Bible's mysterious silence about gun control and immigration by brown people that don't speak English, they are against all of those things. They don't like the government, government regulations or taxes, but they love the police and the military. They also love tax cuts.

This is who we're talking about then, this 30%. They are the heart and soul of the Republican Party. They're also the Republican Party's biggest problem. And they LOVE Sarah Palin. That's part of the problem.

Between 1994 and 2000 this 30% essentially took over the apparatus of the Republican Party at the state level and below. School boards, county supervisors, state committees; they now essentially own it all. If you want to get elected to statewide or national office as a Republican these are the people you're dealing with. These are the people that vote in the state primaries. These are the people Arlen Specter switched parties to avoid. As John McCain found out in 2008, it is no longer possible to get the Republican nomination for anything without at least grudging support from the 30%. And let's remember that if Fred Thompson had been willing to really get off his butt and campaign, or if it had been just McCain and, say, Huckabee in the race without Romney and Giuliani, then McCain probably would have lost. The 30% was not excited about McCain and they feel like they were sold a bill of goods in 2008. That McCain had to be the guy because he was the only one that could draw support from independents and Democrats. We know how that turned out.

The lesson they seem to have drawn from McCain's defeat is not that they were somehow too rigid and not inclusive enough, but conversely, they were too inclusive and not rigid enough. McCain himself is now facing a primary challenge for his Senate seat from one of these 30 percenters. He has a lot of money in the bank and Palin herself has promised to campaign for him so he may pull through this time. But let's put this in perspective. John McCain has a lifetime voting record of 81% conservative from the American Conservative Union (through 2008). In what universe does someone with an 81% conservative rating get a primary challenge from the right wing for not being conservative enough?

This then is the first horn of the dilemma that the Republican Party has made for itself: they need these people. They are not a force in national politics without them. The 30% supply the energy, they pound the pavement, they work the phones, they write inflammatory screeds on the internet; and they supply most of the votes as well. But now this 30% have formed their own little club within the party, true conservatives only. And it's a club that John McCain and his 81% conservative voting record are not conservative enough to join. He's officially a fake conservative, they have their own word for it, a RINO (Republican In Name Only). If they have their way, soon ONLY the 30% will be allowed to be Republicans. Which is, of course, a recipe for electoral suicide. Specter saw the handwriting on the wall and jumped ship. Many old-line Republicans have retired rather than risk losing a primary. McCain has been in the Senate for over 20 years, has a ton of money and a famous name; so they may not be able to get rid of him through a primary. However, he's also about 80 years old, and when he's gone they WILL be able to elect his replacement. As far as the nomination goes anyway.

Because the second horn of the dilemma is that the country is changing. The 30% is on the wrong side of virtually every issue there is, as far as demographics go. The country in general is getting younger, browner, and more tolerant. The three trends that are especially bad news for the GOP are in voter turnout, their bad reputation with younger voters, and the increasing minority population. 2000, 2004, and 2008 each set a record for voter turnout. That's in numbers of voters, not percentage, the 2008 election had about 63% turnout which is the best percentage since 1960. This is bad news for Republicans because it's fairly clear that they maxed out their support in 2004. They got every single 30 percenter to the polls that year, and if turnout numbers continue to rise... They won't be 30 percenters anymore, they'll be 25 percenters, or 20 percenters.

Meanwhile the youth vote is increasing as a percentage. And younger voters are, not universally but generally speaking, considerably more socially liberal than the GOP would prefer. They generally support gays having the same rights as everyone else, and a woman's right to choose and other things that the Republicans consider anathema.

The major way that the 30% folks are forcing the Republican Party to shoot itself in the foot though, is in it's policy on immigration. Here's why: Four states are already majority-minority states. Hawaii, California, New Mexico and Texas. That is, white people make up less than 50% of the population in those states. The Republicans essentially booted themselves into permanent minority party status in California with Proposition 187 in 1994, which was an anti-illegal immigration measure. Arnold Schwarzenegger is the only Republican to win a California election for governor, senator, or president since 1994.

If they do the same thing in Texas, they're pretty much finished in national elections. But that's not the worst of it. By 2050 (wikipedia's estimate is 2042) the country as a whole will be majority-minority. Largely because of illegal immigration. That doesn't mean the actual voting electorate will be less than 50% white in 2042 or 2050, but eventually... And if the Republicans spend 15 or 20 or 30 years with the same kind of immigration rhetoric they're using now, I don't see too many Latino voters choosing the party that wants to ship Mom and Dad back to Guatemala, or Venezuela, or Mexico, or wherever.

So, the GOP's problem is thusly, they need these 30% folks to hang onto what they've already got. If they lose them, it's hard to see where they're going to get new voters from. Heck, in the short term, screaming about gays and immigrants might get them back in the saddle in Congress, at least temporarily. However, in the long term, the tighter they cling to the 30%, the more they cater to them, the harder it's going to be to grow their share of the electorate. The harder it's going to be to say "Haha, just kidding! We really do love everybody, not just old white guys! Please vote for us!" They've locked themselves in the cupboard with these people, and now they can't get out.

Which means they're stuck with Sarah Palin. The Sarah Palin problem is even easier to understand. Approximately 70% of the country thinks she isn't qualified to be President. But the 30% that do are the same 30% that the Republican Party can't do without. The same 30% that largely control the Republican primary process. So, if you're the Republican Party, what do you do? Spend time trying to convince that other 70% that Sarah Palin is some kind of closet genius? Or try to convince the 30% that there's somebody even BETTER out there? "Hey, guys, have you heard? Not only is Tim Pawlenty a conservative just like you and me and Sarah Palin, but he also is the REAL governor of a REAL state; not some pretend-state where they have to pay you to live there." Or maybe, "What's everyone think about this Bobby Jindal? I think he might love Jesus even more than Sarah Palin does, plus, he's down with the brown. Bonus points!" Or even, "Mitt Romney paid me a lot of money to say he's awesome! Even cooler than Sarah Palin! Maybe if you vote for him, he'll pay you a lot of money too!"

Sarah Palin is kind of the 4th Horseman of the Apocalypse for the GOP, the final sign of their doom. George Bush the 1st and Dan Quayle were Famine and Pestilence, George W. Bush was War, and now Sarah Palin is the last. She is Death. Because even if something called the Republican Party survives into the second half of the 21st century, it's not going to be the same party that would nominate Sarah Palin to be vice president, let alone take her seriously as a candidate for president. Or at least, we can always hope.

Reader Question Time!

Reader Andrew J. of Chicago Illinois asks: "How much of the "Obama's done nothing" that gets filtered down to me is fact and how much is fiction? And of the fact---why?

Is it true? did he just waste everyone's time and get us excited for nothing? Is it all poppycock and he really has been doing amazing things that if it were any other president (with lower expectations) we would be very happy about? Did he put all his eggs in one basket and didn't leave time for anything else? What the heck really happened!?"


Hey, Andrew, thanks for your question(s). Might as well start answering them, I suppose. To start with, of course it's not true to say that Obama's done nothing. Heck, by the standards of the last guy's first year in office Obama's been a veritable cyclone of activity; whereas the last guy spent most of his time in that first year flicking off the international community by opting out of treaties and agreements. Oh, and he spent a lot of time at his ranch. And reading children's books to first graders. Of course, he would later make up for this inactivity by starting twice as many wars as any previous president. Unfortunately for Mr. Obama, you don't get judged by what the last guy did, you are judged based on the actual mess the country is in on your watch and what you do about it.

And the country is in a very, very big mess. Multiple big messes, in fact. The fact that they're all left over from the previous administration (you could argue that the economic mess has been brewing for the last 4 administrations) is not going to buy the president any good will for much longer if he doesn't show people that he's trying to clean them up. And Obama simply hasn't been that vigorous in taking on these problems.

Let's look at what he has done. The bank bailout he inherited from Bush was probably (however distastefully) the absolute minimum required to keep the economy from eating itself. The stimulus package he and his Democrats came up with, however, was too small and was misdirected. Yes, $750 billion, or $800 billion or whatever it was sounds like a lot. But the Defense Department's public budget is $650 billion EVERY YEAR. Not counting all the Top Secret money they're spending to build microscopic robots to eat Al-Queda's brains from the inside. And, hilariously, that doesn't even count the money we're spending on the two wars we're fighting. Bush had the money for them authorized separately because he didn't want those huge numbers to show up in the budget when he was already running trillion dollar deficits. So, in the grand scheme of things, a one-time package of $800 billion really isn't that much. We could admit that we really don't care what happens in Iraq and Afghanistan, bring all our troops and equipment home, and save enough money for a couple of stimulus packages that big every year.

The real killer though, was that all this money was sent after the wrong target. Granted, it still did a lot of good, Lord knows we need to spend money on our infrastructure. Most of the money that went to the states was spent filling in the holes they suddenly had in their budgets, which is all to the good. But what it basically amounted to is treading water without addressing the real problem. Which was/is that suddenly a lot of people's homes are worth much less than they thought, while at the same time their mortgage payment has "ballooned" to use the technical term, to several times what it used to be. A lot of people out there suddenly owe more on their mortgage than their house is actually worth. Even more find that they suddenly can't pay their new, "ballooned" monthly mortgage payment.

When I worked in title insurance, the mortgage company would have to send us the loan instrument, the mortgage or deed of trust, or whatever their state used. So, I'd see a lot of these 5-Year Balloon ARM's. Which basically say that your mortgage payment is X for the first 5 years. X is typically already just about as much as the borrower can pay. Since the bank making the loan planned to sell it to someone else, their job became to qualify as many people as possible. These "low for 5 years" mortgage payments helped do that. But you also had to make it look good on the other end, to the people buying the mortgages. That's why after 5 years the borrower's payment goes up (balloons) and they're paying the full principal and interest, plus the interest they missed from the first 5 years. This makes it look like an attractive investment. If you don't have the full picture anyway.

Once I'd read the first one or two, I went to my boss and asked, "How on earth is this a good deal?" The answer of course is that it wasn't a good deal at all. But it isn't a suicidally stupid deal either. In an environment where home prices are rising at a double-digit rate every year and everyone is looking to buy, you live in a house two or three years, let it appreciate, then sell at a healthy profit and go on to the next 5-Year Balloon ARM. In an environment in which home prices are sinking and everyone's trying to sell... yes, then it is a suicidally stupid deal.

My idea for a stimulus package would have been to pass a law requiring all the retarded financial institutions holding mortgage backed securities, or at least sub-prime mortgage backed securities, to sell them to the federal government for 50 cents on the dollar. Yes, they would lose money, but they're also already getting bailed out, screw them. It was their greed, blindness, and stupidity (plus the stupidity of 30 years of federal deregulation with special shout-outs to Ronald Reagan and Phil Gramm) that led to this situation in the first place. Let them lose money. The point is, the federal government now owns all the bad mortgages. Announce a mortgage holiday. Mortgage payments are suspended until you and the government can negotiate a new, non-predatory, deal that lets you keep your house. Adjusting your payment down to what your house is now actually worth. Combine that with some good old-fashioned re-regulation to keep this from happening again. Now THAT'S a stimulus package. Suddenly people feel rich again. They don't have a mortgage payment! They go out and buy shit again. Companies start making shit for them to buy, they hire more people to help them make the shit. More people have money, so they can buy shit, etc., etc.

So, the bailout and stimulus package were kind of weak sauce. What else has Obama done? The Cash for Clunkers program was a great idea, and seemed to be working. Inasmuch as, people were actually buying cars again. But they only ran the thing for a couple months. That's the kind of thing that should have been continued and expanded. Why not do the same thing for major appliances? Get people buying washers and dryers, refrigerators, etc.? People buying stuff is what keeps the economy moving. If something you're doing gets people to buy stuff, keep doing it.

On the international front, he's promised to shut down Guantanamo Bay and he's made several trips abroad to try to start rebuilding our credibility and goodwill with other nations. He's also reshuffling our troops, presumably from Iraq to Afghanistan, but I don't have any hard numbers as to who's going where. And both of those countries are places you're not going to "conquer" unless you're willing to play by Mongol rules. Which I'm going to say is an impossibility in our video over the internet age. I guess the alternative is we could keep a million troops there forever. That might work.

Anyway, the big thing Obama has tried to do is get some kind of health care reform done. He's spent pretty much the whole year on it, and it doesn't look like it's going to happen. This is what most people are talking about when they say Obama hasn't done anything. And that's fair and unfair. It's true that he hasn't put much of his own personal ass on the line with anything specific. He hasn't put together his own plan and sent it to Congress. There hasn't been any full-court press from the White House on this, to my knowledge. He's basically been content to issue fairly vague directives about what he expects from any health care bill before he'll sign it, and left the actual nuts and bolts of it to Congress. Which is always a bad idea.

In his defense however, he thought he was learning from Bill Clinton's mistakes. Back in '93, Bill had Hills put together a health care reform plan. She put together a round-table of industry interests, and they came up with something pretty horrific. Then these same industry interests spent a lot of money ripping the bill to pieces in the media. Congress decided it wasn't worth the trouble, and health care reform was over for another decade. So, Obama's idea seems to have been not to give everyone a specific target to focus on, to get some kind of consensus bill through, on the theory that something is better than nothing.

The problem, of course, is that perpetual fly in the ointment, the Republican Party. They don't get all the credit this time, sadly, there are several Democrats (including, mystifyingly, Obama himself) that are insistent on getting Republican support for health care reform. To this day, I don't know why. Political cover for Democrats in conservative districts? I don't know. I keep hoping that this is all just Phase 1 in his ingenious plan. Let the Republicans wear themselves out on this, frankly crappy, health plan, and then roll out his tremendous Cadillac health care reform bill and just watch their jaws hit the floor.

Because the truth is that what Congress has come up with is not very awesome. Mostly because of concessions made to try and attract Republican and conservative Democratic votes. Doubly ironic because it will be a cold day in hell before Republicans vote for health care reform. It will be a cold day in hell before they vote for anything that will help Obama look like he's doing a good job. The Democrats and Obama are going to have to wise up and start doing it themselves. The Republicans are not going to help. Ever. And learning this, if he has learned, has cost Obama the first year of his term, more or less.

So, has Obama done nothing? Well, no, clearly he's done something. Is doing things. But, has he done enough? Like I said in the beginning, you get judged by the standard of what you have to accomplish. The size of the tasks before you. By that standard, Obama's not doing what he could, or should have. He hasn't done nearly enough.

The thing to do, as I think I mentioned in my last post, was to blitz Congress with bills. And scream at them. Vote now, vote now, vote now! The economy's falling apart, vote now!! I'm doing my part, here are these bills I want you to pass, here's my plan. Now vote!! Or it will be your fault when we're all out selling apples and hunting for tins of dog food in dumpsters!! After September 11, the do-nothing Bush Administration managed to invade Afghanistan and slam the Patriot Act through Congress IN OCTOBER. Not the next October. Not October, 2002. The very same October! The month after September 11. We were facing a much realer crisis in January 2009. Guys with box cutters simply aren't going to be able to pull off a September 11, probably ever again. But if our whole economy collapses, it most likely takes the world economy with it. And at that point it takes government spending on a scale that may actually be impossible for us now to get thing going in the right direction again.

What Obama needed to do was use that. Bush used a fake threat to push the country the last few feet over the edge, why not use a real threat to help pull it back? Get people's mortgages fixed, help them buy cars and appliances and so on, fix health care, throw in a few more goodies while you're at it. You're in a position to hold Wall Street hostage. Use it. No, you don't want everyone to panic, but the economy is in very real trouble, if the only way to save it is to scare the people that think they matter a little, then do it. What we've ended up with is a surface band-aid that saves the bacon of the people at the top, the people that created the mess in the first place, while doing very little for the people down in the trenches that were always going to suffer the most anyway. They basically stopped the bleeding, breathed a sigh of relief, and now everyone seems to think it's back to business as usual.

And, Mr. Obama, you simply can't get something like health care passed under business as usual rules. In another 10 or 20 years when health insurance premiums really start to bite, maybe. But not right now. Not unless you really get behind something and push it. Forget the Republicans, they're not going to help. You basically need one Republican vote right now, in the Senate. Find someone halfway reasonable and squeeze them. Get your caucus together and threaten them, bribe them, do what you have to do. Get them all moving in the same direction. Then roll the damn Republicans and let everyone see them for exactly what they are. Obstructions. What they are is in the way. You're going to have make them get out of the way. Or else, like I said, roll all over them. You still have the numbers for that, until November. But if you can't do one or the other now, right now! Then imagine trying to do it with a Republican Speaker of the House, or staring at a Republican Senate.

The answer to your questions, Andrew, is that Obama hasn't exactly been a do-nothing. But he certainly hasn't done enough to justify people's hopes for him. And he may be running out of time.

So, Here's the Deal

Since I'm currently unemployed anyway, and I just talked with Andy, which always makes me feel lazier than usual; I've decided to start updating this thing much more often. Probably at least 3-4 times a week. Today's installment: Democrats vs. Republicans!

I've been seeing and hearing a lot of talk amongst the chattering classes to the effect that the Republicans are poised to make significant gains in the November elections. Fair enough, the minority party generally does make up some ground in the mid-terms and the Dems have picked off a fair number of traditionally Republican seats the last two cycles. It doesn't seem outrageous to suggest that a few of those seats might flip back this year. But I've even heard some relatively bold souls whispering that the Reptards might actually take back the Senate come November. Again, not completely impossible, especially in a year which has already seen a Reptard win one of Massachusetts' traditionally Democratic Senate seats.

But let's be clear here. The Senate currently stands 59-41 for the Democrats. Dick Cheney is not Vice-President anymore, Joe Biden is. That means The Republicans have to pick up 10 seats this year. They have to get to 51 votes to take over the chamber. And if I'm remembering what I've read correctly, each party has 18 seats at risk this year. That means they have to win 28 out of 36 races. I haven't done any in-depth research on all of these races, but I do know that 6 Republican Senators are retiring this year, compared with 4 Democrats. And at least one Democratic retirement actually helps their chances, as Chris Dodd's re-election was looking increasingly iffy before he decided to retire. His retirement actually clears the way for a more popular contender.

If the Democrats were more competent, I'd say that the stage is set for them to actually increase their total back over 60, rather than worry about Republicans taking back control. Assuming that 10-12 out of each party's 18 seats at risk are relatively safe would mean that we're looking mostly at the 10 retirement states with a few stragglers.

Unfortunately the Democrats have worked long and hard since Obama's election to make it clear that they are anything but competent. And those "stragglers" now include Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid in Nevada among others. And the situation in the House is, if anything, worse. The good news is that it's only February. The Democrats still have time to figure out what they have to do to get this ship righted and show the country that they have what it takes to govern. It kind of makes you sick to think how many awful, awful things the Reptards accomplished with a much smaller majority and essentially no mandate at all; while the Democrats don't even seem to understand that Newtie's Reptards changed the rules in 1994 and they have to start playing if they want to win.

It's probably too late for Obama to accomplish everything that he could have accomplished, but if he starts playing for keeps he should still be able to accomplish something. If that's what he actually wants. His first, and probably biggest, mistake was failing to realize and take advantage of the fact that 2009 had the potential to be a watershed year. A year along the lines of 1933 or 1965 when forceful presidents imposed their wills on the mediocre figures in Congress to get huge piles of legislation passed into law.

He needed to replicate Roosevelt's first 100 days but he counted too much on Congress to shape his signature legislation, on their schedule. What he needed to do was write his own health care bill, make it part of the stimulus package and then dare anyone to vote against it. He should have laughed in the face of anyone that squealed about the deficit, especially any Republican squealers. The deficit is, after all, entirely their own creation. The stimulus package should have been bigger, should have gotten the country working again.

He learned the wrong lesson from the wrong President. Not Roosevelt in 1933, but Clinton in 1993. They put together their own health care bill and sent it to Congress and Congress yawned and said thanks but not thanks. And then a lot of them got sent home the next year by Newt's Army. But 2009 wasn't 1993. In 2009 things were going from very bad to how can it get worse? The country was scared, the economy was in danger of collapsing, there was even talk of nationalizing the banks. This was a climate in which a savvy president, with a solid congressional majority and a brand new mandate having won 53% of the vote the previous November (the highest percentage since George H.W. Bush) could have and should have pushed hard and fast for the big changes that the country needs. Instead they squeaked through a band-aid of a stimulus bill with vague promises of a follow-up bill "if necessary" and turned to health care with this same kind of "do the minimum" philosophy. They even tried to get Republican support! Which is all the proof anyone should need of the delusions they apparently labor under.

Because the second mistake Obama made, and still seems to be making, was/is to treat the Republicans as good-faith partners in government. They aren't and they don't want to be. They don't believe in government. They believe in giving our Wall Street friends a free hand. The Republican Party, as a whole, became an enemy of the United States Government right around the time of Reagan's first inauguration.

They want to starve the government of funds, so they cut taxes. They want to limit government's scope, so they deregulate anything they can think of. But they want to get re-elected so they increase spending to pay for projects in their districts. And they're terrified of everyone poorer than they are (everyone) which means they want the biggest military on earth, so they increase the defense budget. This is where deficits come from. This is the real Republican agenda, stripped to its essence: tax cuts for our (wealthy) buddies, deregulation to get the government (us) out of those same buddies' hair, huge military budgets to protect their buddies' incredible fortunes, more spending in their districts to buy votes, borrow the money to pay for it all in ever more mind-bending quantities and spout a lot of talk about Jesus and Judeo-Christian values to draw in the rubes.

The ironic thing about all this 2010 election talk is not that it's so premature, although it is. The ironic thing about all the 2010 chatter is that in the long run it may not matter. The Republican Party is an entity at war with itself and on the wrong side of too many issues to continue any longer as it has. I'll try and discuss this in my next post, since this one is already absurdly long. Until the next time true-believers!