Is our free-market economy working properly?

An interesting story on South Korea's broadband internet infrastructure, which is both faster and cheaper than ours, because it is highly regulated by the South Korean government to ensure lower barriers to entry for competitors.

How do we grapple with using state power to ensure a certain level of competition?

Read the article on CNN.com here.

Treading water

Unless Mitt Romney can be proud of his signature accomplishment in Massachusetts which is his Affordable Care Act (ACA), a conservative free-market solution to provide health insurance to people, he's just not going to make sense.

I'll say it again, Mitt Romney is the Republicans' strongest contender for President in 2012. The question is, can he survive the Republican primary from a party that's still searching for what it stands for post-2008?

I hope it's the Governor Mitt Romney party that wins, but my gut says that the people want it to be the Candidate Mitt Romney party. Governor Mitt Romney won't be able to win the Republican primary because of his success on healthcare and his Mormonism, which many conservative evangelicals deem to be "not Christian."

UPDATE: Daniel Gross has an interesting article on Mitt Romney's legitimate expertise to become the national healthcare implementation czar (a hypothetical position). To read the article on Slate.com click here.

A Song for the Teabaggers

I just realized how much the teabaggers have been through the past couple of months.  A black President, a black Attorney General, a latino Supreme Court Justice, healthcare subsidies for the middle class.  There's been a whole lot of change lately, and change is scary especially when you don't have any job.

Rest easy, teabaggers.  Just think how boring sports would be if Jackie Robinson never crossed the color barrier.

Roll with the changes...

Why backroom deals are good for democracy

Backroom deals allow our congressmen to make realistic pragmatic compromises on major issues and then pretend to their base that they fought for the most crazy liberal item, or the most crazy conservative item. As someone who's seen government up close, the most progress towards real movement on issues is in conference committee and behind closed doors.

Senator Bob Corker (R - Tennessee) has just announced that he is going to cross the aisle in order to vote for new financial regulation reform, the big pillars of which most Congressmen agree; end too big to fail, can't use FDIC protected money for hedge fund like activity, and the like. Senator Corker and Senator Dodd  (D - Connecticut) have been meeting behind closed doors for months working out a bi-partisan deal on Financial Regulatory reform. And apparently, Senator Corker has said that the Republican Leadership strategy to leave those discussions has not been conducive to productive deal-making on an issue most Americans want to see pass.

Corker said Republicans lost their leverage when they failed to rally around the emerging deal on which he and Dodd were working until several weeks ago. Corker suggested that the lack of enthusiasm from his colleagues about those talks played into Dodd’s decision to cut short his work with Corker and move a bill to committee.

"Had everybody come together around that bipartisan negotiation, and I think had Chris [Dodd] seen that other Republicans would actually join in at that time, he might have continued on. But I think the fact that  didn't occur ... the die was cast," Corker said. 

The United States is a democratic representative republic, which means that we elect people who represent our rough values, but who may make judgments different than ours on specific issues. Because the electorate is so polarized at the moment, it's hard to work on pragmatic reform and yes compromise in public view as voters on both the right and left will then either fail to donate or to vote for their representative "for giving in to the other side."

To read Victoria Crane's Politico story behind the scenes of the defection click here.

Mental Health Break

Joe Wong, a Chinese immigrant and new American citizen, who also happens to live in Cambridge, MA tears it up at the Congressional TV & Radio Correspondents Dinner.

Why the Socialism moniker won't work in hurting Healthcare reform

Let's do a brief thought experiment. Close your eyes and imagine that the healthcare bill does not exist. Imagine that no public insurance exists either, no medicare, no medicaid.  Heck, imagine that the U.S. government and their getting into your biznass doesn't even exist. You live in a perfect libertarian nirvana, where a true free market exists (sans labor because we all know U.S. labor can't compete with Mexican labor). There is only you, your doctor, and your private, for-profit insurance company and insurance plan.

Question one: Are you in the doctor's office, the hospital or in the emergency room?

Question two: Are you paying your healthcare premiums consistently and on time?

If you answered no to question one and yes to question two then right now, your money yes YOUR MONEY is being spent on someone else's healthcare!!!!!! Can you believe it??? Those SOCIALIST COMMUNISTS at BlueCross/BlueShield and CIGNA. They've just taken some of your money and used it to pay for grandma's new hip replacement! For shame.

Insurance is a socialist mechanism.  Many people pay a (relatively) small amount of what their costs will be while they don't have a problem. Their house isn't on fire or flooded, they don't have cancer or asthma, their car isn't in a tremendous accident.  These people pay these small amounts of money and most of them don't end up using all of that money.  The insurance company then takes some of that money and tries to make money on that big pile of money but takes the money from the people who aren't using their allocation at the moment to pay for someone else.  When you get sick, someone who hasn't gotten sick, or hasn't been sick for awhile is paying for you.

So...private insurance in a capitalist market is operationally a socialist good.  It pools lots of people together without problems to pay for the peeps with problems. Changing the payer of some of those payments from Blue Cross to the U.S. government does nothing to change the fact that insurance is a socialist mechanism.  Also, the larger the pool the more money you have available to pay for the risk. That's why big insurance pools lower costs because there's a higher ratio of healthy people to sick people.  That means more people are paying for a small amount of people's healthcare, which at first sounds really unfair.  However, the benefit resulting from this large pool means that the risk is diluted enough so that the insurance payment can be smaller per person, thus lowering customers' premiums.

So insurance is socialistic whether you were mandated to purchase it (car insurance and now health insurance) or not (life insurance).

Healthcare Bill and Sidecar Amendment pass

This bill was not perfect.  No legislation is.  The bill should have had some stronger tort reform measures and should have had some limited public option to compete with private insurers. What this bill is though is a start.

We can't fix the problems in this country if we just put them off for years down the road because the tough issues to solve never get any easier (healthcare, deficit reduction, energy infrastructure and delivery reform, education). Tonight we saw something unique.  We witnessed a bunch of Democratic Representatives vote for a bill that may put their jobs in jeopardy, and that's a great thing.  Because most of the time, most politicians just do whatever might get them re-elected, but many of these members did exactly the opposite tonight.  They took a chance, because making a difference meant more than keeping their seat.

Next stop...Immigration reform (because it's time to hear the word "Amnesty" being shouted for 8 continuous months regardless of the policy details)

One full page of the healthcare bill (Page 3)

Reps. and Senators always complain about the length of bills.  First of all, most of their staff has to read the bill and second, because Federal Law is written in code, the formatting is double spaced.  I have copy-pasted the entire 3rd page of the proposed healthcare bill below. I think they can handle it.

Sec. 2209. Origination of Direct Loans at institutions outside the United
States.
Sec. 2210. Conforming amendments.
Sec. 2211. Terms and conditions of loans.
Sec. 2212. Contracts; mandatory funds.
Sec. 2213. Agreements with State-owned banks.
Sec. 2214. Income-based repayment.
Subtitle B—Health
Sec. 2301. Insurance reforms.
Sec. 2302. Drugs purchased by covered entities.
Sec. 2303. Community health centers.


1. TITLE I—COVERAGE, MEDICARE,
MEDICAID, AND REVENUES


Subtitle A—Coverage
3 SEC. 1001. AFFORDABILITY.
4 (a) PREMIUM TAX CREDITS
.—Section 36B of the Internal Revenue Code of 1986, as added by section 1401 
6 of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and 
7 amended by section 10105 of such Act, is amended— 
8 (1) in subsection (b)(3)(A)— 
9 (A) in clause (i), by striking ‘‘with respect
10 to any taxpayer’’ and all that follows up to the
11 end period and inserting ‘‘for any taxable year
12 shall be the percentage such that the applicable
13 percentage for any taxpayer whose household
14 income is within an income tier specified in the
15 following table shall increase, on a sliding scale
16 in a linear manner, from the initial premium
17 percentage to the final premium percentage
18 specified in such table for such income tier:

Chris Matthews Hammers it Home

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Happy Saint Patrick's Day!

The only thing a little Irish boy wants:

Come On Israel, throw me a freaking bone!

I haven't had a lot of time to decompress what happened in Israel over the last week, but to me it stinks of crazy arrogance.  Just because the U.S. and Israel are close friends and allies doesn't mean that we'll agree on everything, but I believe that Israel is shooting itself in the foot here.  We give them $3 billion a year in money and fancy weaponry and they totally fart on the indirect negotiations as Vice President Biden is arriving?  This isn't about Obama's stature or Biden's, this is about the United States' position.  And just because you disagree with the state of Israel's international policy doesn't mean you don't think the Jewish State is important and essential to the world order, but come on!

Tom Friedman puts it more eloquent than I do here:

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Mental Health Break

Guster! Sorry, I'm singing along for some of this.

If you're pro-life, you should want the healthcare bill to pass

Although I'm pro-choice, we all want there to be fewer abortions in the United States. T.R. Reid, a great news reporter on healthcare issues throughout the world has a must-read article on expanded healthcare coverage's affect on the abortion rate in rich, modern democracies like ours in The Washington Post.  Key passage:

In Britain, only 8 percent of the population is Catholic (compared with 25 percent in the United States). Abortion there is legal. Abortion is free. And yet British women have fewer abortions than Americans do. I asked Cardinal Hume why that is.

The cardinal said that there were several reasons but that one important explanation was Britain's universal health-care system. "If that frightened, unemployed 19-year-old knows that she and her child will have access to medical care whenever it's needed," Hume explained, "she's more likely to carry the baby to term. Isn't it obvious?"

Dissent of the Day

My dear friend, and former colleague Michael Flynn wrote his dissent on the new hip Google Buzz.

Michael Flynn - I don't really remember any Republican outrage about Democratic book deals? I think your line is confused sir 3:40 pm

I have decided to link to the following Boston Globe article from the time. Choice quote, from someone we both know and respect, here:

House minority leader Bradley H. Jones of North Reading said he was stunned that the New York trip was about a book proposal.

"I'm trying to pick my jaw off the ground,' Jones said. "A book deal? It could have been handled at a different time, when the Legislature is not dealing with one of his major initiatives.

"This was purely, only for his own personal gain, financial or political," Jones said. "I assumed it was some personal matter; a family member had a medical issue. But this is for his own personal gain."

If healthcare is such a good issue for Republicans, they should let it pass

Listen closely to what Republican political consultant Todd Harris is saying.

The politics of healthcare are real dim for the Democrats. If this bill passes, Democratic candidates' (political) blood will be in the streets. So therefore logically, shouldn't congressional Republicans want this huge government takeover boondoggle to pass?  That way they can clean up in 2010 and in 2012 and repeal the bill!  But why are they working so hard to block the bill?

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That's because they know this stuff becomes extremely popular once its passed. Even in this debate, they've campaigned against CUTS to Medicare, which as you all know is a government-run program, cuts that they supported as recently as the Bush administration.

Where's the Republican outrage at Scott Brown's book deal?

Senator Scott Brown just signed a book deal with Harper Collins due for a 2011 release.

First of all, let me clarify that I don't give a crap when a politician signs a book deal because I think they can handle the tough task of legislating one or two days a week while they - ahem, their ghostwriter - write their political memoir.

However, whenever a Democratic office holder does this it's a massive abuse of power and there's all sorts of Republican outrage!!!

Sen. Scott Brown is "writing" a book and he just signed book deal with Harper Collins. Republicans don't seem to care, I don't care, and liberals don't care either because he's not writing the thing anyway. But if you were mad at Deval Patrick for signing a book deal in 2008 then you should be mad at Scott Brown for signing a book deal in 2010.

Just sayin'.

"Have you ever heard of caulk being used in someone's body before?"

Hilarious.

Simma down na!

I realize that things have gotten a li'l political 'round here and I haven't posted much comedy in awhile so I searched for my current favorite comedian named Eugene, Eugene Mirman.  Apparently, he has a new album out and this is the title track.  Enjoy.

Mitt Romney will say anything to be President

I actually liked Mitt Romney as Governor of Massachusetts. My dad voted for him for Senate in 1994 against Ted Kennedy and again for Governor in 2002 and I would have voted for him in 2007 had he run for re-election because he was a moderate Republican who was good at balancing the budget and was realistic on issues such as abortion and healthcare reform.

However, Mitt Romney really wants to be President and has over-learned the lesson of "know your audience". He will never win the Presidency if he seems like a complete opportunist.  One of the things I always admired about George W. Bush is agree or disagree with him, you always knew where he stood.  With Romney, a virtual pro-choicer vs. Ted Kennedy in 1994 and a staunch pro-lifer as a Presidential candidate, you have no idea where he stands. He just stands wherever the rhetoric is most likely to make him president.

And again, as long as this recession continues, I don't see how a country with high unemployment elects a guy who was CEO for a business which helped companies be more profitable by laying off people. Trust me, if when Romney runs in 2012, he'll have the CEOs already.

To see Romney's early pro-choiceness click for the jump.

Babies in Bars in Brooklyn!

And more specifically in my neighborhood of Park Slope! Not cool babies, not cool.

Read the article here and take the poll to see how people feel about babies in bars.

He's trying

Again and again, I keep on trying to hammer out there that it's not what the president accomplishes it's how.  People keep on forgetting that the founders intended for Congress to handle what the country accomplishes (or doesn't accomplish for that matter).

Here's President Obama's letter to Congress concerning healthcare reform and on his openness to key Republican ideas in crafting and shaping the bill.


obamaletter -

Quote of the Day

“Those who are responsible for training for the Olympics must take responsibility. They must have the courage to submit their resignation. And if they do not have this resolve, we will help them.” - President Dmitri Medvedev, on Russia's poor Olympic performance.

For the full article, click here.

The beautiful end of white / black culture

This week the girls of Zeta Tau Alpha, a sorority comprised of mostly white members from the University of Arkansas won the 2010 Sprite Step-Off a.k.a.The National Stepping Championship in Atlanta, Georgia.  Just watch how the largely black audience is totally eating up their performance. We are still a racially polarized society, but stuff likes this makes it more and more evident that at least for our generation and those younger than us, the culture and racial wars are largely over and irrelevant.



In case you weren't aware, stepping is an African-American version of cheerleading prominent in high school (and some collegiate) basketball and football games and is heavily used in the Greek system as an initiation practice.  Here's a more offical definition from Wikipedia.

Stepping or step-dancing is a form of percussive dance in which the participant's entire body is used as an instrument to produce complex rhythms and sounds through a mixture of footsteps, spoken word, and hand claps. Though stepping may be performed by an individual, it is generally performed by groups of three or more, often in arrangements that resemble military formations.

For a more eloquent discussion of this event and its cultural impact on the black community, read this article from TheRoot.com.