Month: October 2012

“Oh, how terrible federal regulations are!” Mr. Romey tells us. Government should just get out of the way so big corporations can do what they do best. And what is that you ask? Well let me sum it up for you:: Lie, cheat and steal money out of the consumers’ pockets. Like for example, this case out where CVS took money of the pockets of anyone covered by Medicare in violation of federal laws and regulations:

WASHINGTON — The Department of Justice said Monday that a unit of CVS Caremark Corp. has agreed to pay $5.25 million to settle allegations that it reported false information on prescription drug prices to the government’s Medicare program.

Federal investigators said CVS’ RxAmerica subsidiary reported false information about the prices of generic prescription drugs between 2007 and 2008. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services used this information in a website called Plan Finder, which seniors could use to estimate their out-of-pocket drug expenses. But Department of Justice officials said the actual drug prices offered by the company were “in some cases significantly higher” than those submitted for use on the website.

That’s what in the world of the organized crime would be called fraud and racketeering. Surprised that such a prominent company such as CVS would be cheating Medicare recipients out of who knows how much money? And do you believe that this is just a one time rogue incident? Well, not exactly. It seems just as CVS settled one case of defrauding their customers, another one popped up:

The HHS Office of Inspector General has launched a federal probe into complaints that CVS Caremark refilled patients’ prescriptions and submitted insurance claims without the patients’ knowledge, according to an official familiar with the case, the Los Angeles Times reports. […]

In a separate case last year, CVS agreed to pay $17.5 million to resolve allegations that it falsified Medicaid claims for prescription drugs in California and nine other states.

This is just one Pharmacy chain. Now imagine how much the really big time criminals in Wall Street firms, Big Banks and in the Insurance Industry are stealing from you. And what is Mitt’s “plan” for making our economy grow so you can keep more of your hard earned money? Well, let’s just say, cutting regulations and laws that get in the way of corporations stealing from you earning bigger profits is high on his list of things to do starting day one of any Romney presidency.

But now the regulation-be-damned camp — represented by the Romney campaign — has come up with a “fix” that avoids the messiness of political discussion and debate by sidestepping the democratic process entirely. Never mind the inconvenient fact that Dodd-Frank is the law of the land, and that it is the constitutional duty of the executive branch — to which Republican candidate Mitt Romney aspires — to put it into practice.

Under the would-be president’s plan, agencies would have to eliminate existing regulations in order to implement new ones. Specifically, agencies issuing new regulations would be required to balance the costs of new regulations by identifying offsetting cost reductions in existing regulations. In addition, Congress would have new powers to block regulations that are proposed by the agencies. As Governor Romney’s economic plan affirms, “President Romney will issue an executive order instructing all agencies that they must invite Congress to vote up or down on their major regulations and forbidding them from putting those regulations into effect without congressional approval.”

And of course, the Romney plan is not just limited to financial regulations or health care. Do you like clean air and clean water? Well say goodbye to both if Romney gets elected.

Instead, the debate has focused on whether and how much environmental regulations hurt businesses, especially the energy industry.

Mostly it’s been GOP candidate Mitt Romney criticizing President Obama for what he sees as overzealous environmental regulations that strangle the economic recovery. […]

On the campaign trail, Romney repeatedly says Obama’s regulations are strangling the economic recovery. […]

“A President Romney could starve the agencies of money needed to enforce existing public health safeguards — in effect, take the environmental cop off the beat,” says Dan Weiss, a volunteer adviser to the Obama campaign and a fellow at the action fund for the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank.

So, here’s the deal Romney is offering America:

1. Tax cuts for the wealthiest;
2. Eliminate Tax Loopholes for the Middle Class;
3. Kill off any regulations that corporations don’t like;
4. Send your job to China; and
5. Hope you die as soon as you run out of money from paying high insurance costs, bank fees, securities fraud, consumer fraud, poor to non-existent healthcare,and living in a dirty, polluted, disease infested environment, so you don’t become one of those “takers” like our vets, disabled people, retired people, poor people, unemployed people, et alia.

So, he’s making you this deal, America. Do you want this deal? Really?

There is something weird about how Republicans go around accusing Democrats of being anti-Israel or anti-Jewish and then have to apologize for using nasty stereotypes about Jews. It’s like Tommy Thompson and Mitt Romney see Jews as this endangered species of super-rich bankers who are really good at collecting their debts. It’s very strange. Any idiot can say that they support Israel more than the other guy, but it doesn’t make them a friend of Jewish people. For starters, Jews shouldn’t consider anyone a reliable friend if they have to explain to them that they don’t like to be culturally reduced to people who “make money.”

I don’t get the Republican sense of humor:

Jason Thompson, the son of former [Wisconsin] Gov. Tommy Thompson, was caught on video Sunday suggesting at a Republican event that voters this fall could send President Barack Obama back “to Kenya.”

“We have the opportunity to send President Obama back to Chicago – or Kenya,” Jason Thompson, an attorney at Michael Best and Friedrich, said during a fall brunch hosted by the Kenosha County Republican Party.

Jason Thompson’s comment about Obama prompted laughs from the crowd, with one woman jokingly adding, “We are taking donations for that Kenya trip.”

For years, a fringe group of Obama critics has promoted the discredited “birther” argument that the first-term Democratic president was not born in the U.S. Though Obama’s father was Kenyan, the White House released Obama’s birth certificate last year showing he was born in a Hawaii hospital on Aug. 4, 1961.

Also speaking at the Kenosha event were Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus and Wisconsin Republican Party Chairman Brad Courtney. The video was taken by a Democratic Party operative and posted at BuzzFeed Politics early Sunday evening.

I don’t think Jason Thompson is a secret birther. But that just makes his joke stranger for me. I see it as a racist joke. The only alternative would be if he were taking a tongue-in-cheek shot at his own party’s nutters. But the context really argues against that interpretation. Do Republicans think “Go Back to Africa” jokes are actually amusing?

So, CNN‘s Candy Crowley, who is going to moderate tomorrow’s townhall-style presidential debate, wants to interject herself into the Q & A of the contenders by the public despite that not being what either campaign agreed to.

While an early October memorandum of understanding between the Obama and Romney campaigns suggests CNN’s Candy Crowley would play a limited role in the Tuesday-night session, Crowley, who is not a party to that agreement, has done a series of interviews on her network in which she has suggested she will assume a broader set of responsibilities. As Crowley put it last week, “Once the table is kind of set by the town-hall questioner, there is then time for me to say, ‘Hey, wait a second, what about X, Y, Z?’”

In the view of both campaigns and the commission, those and other recent comments by Crowley conflict with the language the two campaigns agreed to, which delineates a more limited role for the moderator of the town-hall debate. The questioning of the two candidates is supposed to be driven by the audience members themselves — likely voters selected by the Gallup Organization.

I guess Ms. Crowley heard all the criticism that Jim Lehrer received for being a potted plant and she doesn’t want to get the same treatment. I can’t say that I blame her. Personally, I would prefer it if she would call bullshit because otherwise that becomes the president’s job. And the president would rather answer the voters’ questions than spend all his time correcting whatever it is that Romney just said.

Newt Gingrich said (about Romney) that it is impossible to debate a liar. I don’t think it is impossible, but it is more difficult if there is no moderator willing to challenge blatant falsehoods and flip-flops. In the Saturday Night Live skit of the first debate, they had Jim Lehrer tell the president that Romney had just claimed credit for killing bin-Laden. They got that wrong. Jim Lehrer probably wouldn’t have even mentioned a lie like that. At least, that’s what his record on that night tells us. We don’t need a repeat of that.

On the other hand, Candy Crowley’s idea of the truth has never been all that firm, so maybe she should just stay out of it.

I’ll admit that I don’t like the trajectory of the presidential race right now and that it is the opposite of what I wanted and expected and predicted just a few short weeks ago. However, things still look good for an Obama victory and our senate candidates are doing very well. Control of the House is still within our grasp. So, I am willing to engage in a little bit of conjecture about a potential second term for the Obama administration.

But first a word about his first term. Obama sent a message when he decided to retain Robert Gates as his Defense Secretary. He also sent a message when he made Illinois Republican Ray LaHood his Transportation Secretary, offered the Commerce Department to New Hampshire Republican Judd Gregg, and nominated a Republican to run the Army. He wasn’t just making a go at “changing the tone” in Washington DC; he was making it clear that it was okay for moderate Republicans to cross over and support his presidency. The irony is that this helped capture the middle so effectively that it made it much easier for the Republicans to lurch to the far right and start talking about birth certificates and death panels.

Obama hopes to retain enough of the Gates/LaHood/Powell/Hagel/Chafee/Jeffords Republicans to earn himself a second term. In his second term he should aim to lock in this group as a center-right appendage of the Democratic Party. It will be a gift to his successors. One major coup would be if he could get Dick Lugar to agree to be a part of his administration. I would not offer him the State Department. That should go to John Kerry, who has earned it. But Lugar might make a good replacement for Susan Rice as ambassador to the United Nations. I don’t mean that he would be a better ambassador or that his views would be more valuable. But it is probably time for Amb. Rice to find a new challenge anyway, and Lugar would inoculate Obama against the crazy charges he will undoubtedly face on foreign policy. More importantly, Lugar’s mere presence within the administration would send a message to a lot of soft Republicans that it is okay to support the Democrats’ foreign policy.

Another coup would be getting Olympia Snowe to agree to work with the administration. Finding an appropriate role for her would be harder because it would have to carry some degree of prestige in order to be at all attractive to her. Since the Census isn’t coming up until 2020, it would be safe to put a Republican in charge of the Commerce Department. Perhaps that would be enough for Snowe.

As for Lieberman, my inclination is to give him nothing. Keep him in mothballs in case you need him for some bullshit commission on something or other.

There’s a tension within any progressive between wanting to run the most progressive administration possible and building the strongest possible defense against Republican rule. I come down on the side of caution in most instances because I am less worried about coming up short on progress than I am about letting the modern GOP get another sniff of power before they are forced to moderate in the face of demographic change. There are things that a progressive would do a lot better at the United Nations than Dick Lugar and policies that would be better enacted with a progressive in charge of the Transportation or Commerce Departments. But I am willing to trade that for a more robust hold on power in general. Owning the White House is the single most important thing. More specifically, denying the White House to neo-conservative plutocratic socially conservative crooks is the most important thing. Until that changes, I want a strong coalition that includes pillars of the center-right.

Where I’d move in a more progressive direction is in less high-profile posts. Elizabeth Warren is a great example of that. The idea isn’t so much to govern in the center as to make it safe for centrists to help you govern.

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As a Pennsylvanian, there is a lot I could say, both positive and negative, about Arlen Specter’s life and public service. He was a complicated fellow who compiled a very mixed record. I am not surprised to discover that I am saddened by his death, but I have spent many hours of my life feeling exasperated by Specter’s behavior. I’m not going to go into all of that now, because I believe it is polite to withhold criticism for a few days after public figures die. I will, however, say that the strongest impression I have of Specter was formed from reading about his interview with Gaeton Fonzi where he unsuccessfully attempted to explain the bullet holes in JFK’s jacket and shirt and how they could be consistent with the autopsy report and his single-bullet theory. You can read part of the account of that interview here. Unfortunately, the interview of Fonzi portion is riddled with typos. Here’s the basics of it though. Back in the 1960’s, Mr. Fonzi read an article that questioned the findings of the Warren Commission. His reaction was that the author must be some kind of crackpot, so he interviewed him and discovered that he had some legitimate points. Since he lived in Philly and Arlen Specter had just been elected District Attorney, he decided to go ask Specter about some of the seeming discrepancies in the Report. What happened next was kind of amazing.

Remember that the bullets from Oswald came from behind the president. And the trajectory of the bullets started six stories above ground. So, any bullet passing through the president would make a hole in his jacket and shirt that was lower in the front than in the back (barring some ricochet off bone). That wasn’t the only problem, though. The “entry” holes in the jacket and shirt of the president were five to six inches below the collar, but the actual wound was reported to be under his ear.

The photographs of the shirt worn by the President shows a hole in the back consistent with the one in the jacket, about five-and-three-quarter inches below the top of the collar and one-and-one-eighth inches to the right of the middle. The discrepancy is obvious.

The locations of both these holes are inconsistent with the wound below the back of the right ear described in the Commission’s autopsy report.

I’ll never forget asking Specter about that as I sat in his City Hall office in Philadelphia. (It was about a year after he had returned from his Warren Commission job; he had recently been elected District Attorney.)

“Well,” he said, “that difference is accounted for because the President is waving his arm.” He got up from his desk and attempted to demonstrate his explanation on me, pulling my arm up high over my head. “Wave your arm a few times,” he said, “wave at the crowd.” He was standing behind me now, jabbing a finger into the base of my neck. “Well, see, if the bullet goes in here, the jacket gets hunched up. If you take this point right here and then you strip the coat down, it comes out at a lower point.”

A lower point?

“Well, not too much lower on your example, but the jacket rides up.”

If the jacket were “hunched up,” I asked, wouldn’t there have been two holes as a result of the doubling over of the cloth?

“No, not necessarily. It … it wouldn’t be doubled over. When you sit in the car it could be doubled over at most any point, but the probabilities are that … aaah … that it gets … that … aaah … this … this is about the way the jacket rides up. You sit back … sit back now … all right now … if … usually, as your jacket lies there, the doubling is right up here, but if … but if you have a bullet hit you right about here, which is where I had it, where your jacket sits … it’s not … it ordinarily doesn’t crease that far back.”

What about the shirt?

“Same thing.”

Was Specter saying there was no inconsistency between the Commission’s location of the wound and the holes in the clothing?

“No, not at all. That gave us a lot of concern. First time we lined up the shirt … after all, we lined up the shirt … and the hole in the shirt is right about, right about the knot of the tie, came right about here in the slit in the front … “

But where did it go in the back?

“Well, the back hole, when the shirt is laid down, comes … aah … well, I forget exactly where it came, but it certainly wasn’t higher, enough higher to … aah … understand the … aah … the angle of decline which …”

Was it lower? Was it lower than the slit in the front?

“Well, I think that … that if you took the shirt without allowing for its being pulled up, that it would either have been in line or somewhat lower.”

Somewhat LOWER?

“Perhaps. I … I don’t want to say because I don’t really remember. I got to take a look at that shirt.”

You can read the Warren Commission’s account of this bullet here. Mr. Fonzi was so suspicious of Specter’s behavior and explanation that he spent years investigating the assassination, including for Congress. You can read his bio here.

We really have very little privacy left in this country. The issue is both big and small. Obviously, it is too easy for the government to get away with snooping on us without getting a warrant. That’s the big issue. But people probably care more that both parties are placing cookies on their computers to find out if they are religious or watch porn, or both. I suggest that the first party to seriously take up the idea of protecting people’s online privacy from corporations and the government and political parties is going to get a lot of support.

This Associated Press article attempts to tackle a pretty big topic. What is the difference, if there is any difference, between a white person voting for a political candidate because the candidate is white, and a black person voting for a candidate because they are black? Unfortunately, the article doesn’t do much more than collect a sample of black people saying that they support Obama because he is black. Here’s one example:

The actor Samuel L. Jackson said much the same thing: “I voted for Barack because he was black,” he told Ebony magazine. “Cuz that’s why other folks vote for other people – because they look like them.”

I’m pretty sure that I could take the political positions of Barack Obama and Mitt Romney and present them to Samuel L. Jackson and he would say he prefers Obama’s policies. I am also pretty sure that he wouldn’t change his mind if it turned out that the race of the candidates were reversed. It’s true that Obama got 95% of the black vote in 2008, but Kerry got 88% in 2004 and Gore got 90% in 2000. Blacks prefer the Democratic Party in overwhelming numbers. Women preferred the Obama/Biden ticket to the McCain/Palin ticket by a wide margin. Barack Obama is the 44th president of the United States, but he is the first president who wasn’t a white man. He was the first presidential nominee who wasn’t a white man. No one votes for a presidential candidate because he’s a white man. No one is going to vote for Mitt Romney because he’s white. But some people will vote for him because he’s a Mormon.

Sometimes, groups that have been discriminated against will rally around someone from their group who is breaking new ground even if they disagree with them on a lot of things. Italian-Americans were excited when Antonin Scalia was nominated to be on the Supreme Court. The then New York Governor Mario Cuomo threatened any Democratic senators against voting against him. He was confirmed 98-0. There is a small degree of that kind of behavior going on in the black community, but it is impossible to find an issue where Romney’s policies are preferred to Obama’s by a majority of blacks.

The problem with this Associated Press article is that it does a very poor job of explaining why blacks prefer the Democratic Party and it does an even worse job of explaining why some white folks are voting against Barack Obama simply because of his appearance.

When you ask a black person if they are voting for Barack Obama because he is black, you need to be careful to make sure you know what their answer means. Did they vote for John Kerry and Al Gore and Bill Clinton and Michael Dukakis, and Walter Mondale, too? Because, if they did, I don’t think you have explained much by getting them to say that they support Obama because he is black.

When you ask a white person if they are voting for Mitt Romney because he is white, it matters quite a lot to know whether they supported every Democrat until Obama. If they considered themselves a Democrat for thirty years but won’t vote for Obama because of his race, then that is a whole different kettle of fish.

Because what you are really trying to discover here is whether there are people who are voting for or against a candidate solely because of race. And only racists do that. Find me a black person who would vote for Allen West for president over Hillary Clinton despite preferring Clinton’s policies on everything, and I’ll show you a racist black person. But there are not many black people like that in this country. And there a lot of white folks who are Democrats every day of the week until they have to choose a black candidate over a white one.

Racial or ethnic pride is a lot less problematic when it comes from historically marginalized groups than when it comes from the white majority that has always held power in this country, and that is because they are behaving in an affirmative way. They aren’t acting out of hate for the other. They are celebrating their own progress in obtaining equal treatment rather than resenting having to share a small degree of their power. But it doesn’t extend to tokenism. Many women were for Hillary Clinton for affirmative reasons, but they couldn’t transfer those feelings to Sarah Palin because she didn’t share their values and her policies would not have contributed to women’s equality.

This isn’t rocket science. Black people like the Democratic Party. They like Barack Obama, too. In combination, it’s a recipe for monolithic support. But almost no one is truly voting for Barack Obama solely because of his race.

If the latest polls have you biting your fingernails, I have something to cheer you up. The Rocky Mountain Poll has both president and the Democrats’ senate candidate up in Arizona.

After trailing Mitt Romney by as much as eight points in the days immediately following the Presidential debate, the President is now in a statistical tie with Romney in Arizona both as regards the overall electorate and among those mostly likely to cast ballots. While Obama leads Romney by two points in the race for President, the gap is within the study’s margin of error and basically means they are in a dead heat.

In the U.S. Senate race, Democrat Richard Carmona has a four point lead over Republican Jeff Flake, which again indicates a dead even race, since the vote gap is within the margin of error of the survey. Thus it must be concluded that Arizona is definitely a battleground state for both the Presidential and the U.S. Senate races and there can be little doubt but that the outcome will be largely dependent on which political party does the best job in turning out its voters and whether the Democrats can hang onto the Latino vote.

Hey, I am just trying to keep you sane. Do you need more good news? How about this from Pubic Policy Polling?

PPP’s newest Ohio poll finds Barack Obama leading 51-46, a 5 point lead not too different from our last poll two weeks ago when he led 49-45.

The key finding on this poll may be how the early voters are breaking out. 19% of people say they’ve already cast their ballots and they report having voted for Obama by a 76-24 margin. Romney has a 51-45 advantage with those who haven’t voted yet, but the numbers make it clear that he already has a lot of ground to make up in the final three weeks before the election.

We’ve found a major improvement in Mitt Romney’s image in most of the states that we’ve polled since the Presidential debate, but Ohio is an exception. His favorability now is a 45/51 spread, showing no improvement from his 45/49 breakdown two weeks ago. Obama meanwhile has seen a small spike in his approval rating, from 48/49 to 50/48.

No wonder the Republican Secretary of State in Ohio has been doing everything he can to discourage early voting.